Abstract

Doublespeak is the language deliberately used to disguise the actual meaning and mislead or cheat the audience. This paper introduces the basic types of doublespeak and makes pragmatic analysis of it with the help of the Cooperative Principle, the Speech act theory, and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. As the results have demonstrated, ill-intended doublespeak may corrupt thoughts, impair communication, and erode trust. It is therefore advisable for the audience to guard against doublespeak and for the speakers to be sincere and honest in the communication.

Key words: doublespeak, cooperative principle, speech act theory, euphemism,jargon, gobbledygook, inflated language, communication

摘要

“欺人之谈”是指为了误导或欺骗听众而有意使用的模棱两可的语言。本文介绍了“欺人之谈”的基本种类，并运用合作原则、言语行为理论及萨丕尔•沃尔夫假说对这一语言现象进行了语用分析。分析结果表明，恶意使用的“欺人之谈”会腐蚀思想，阻碍交流，损害人与人之间的相互信任。因此在交际过程中，听者须谨防“欺人之谈”的危害，而说者应该树立真诚、诚实的交流动机。

关键词：欺人之谈；合作原则；言语行为理论；委婉语；行话；官样文章；言过其实；交流

1.    Introduction
In English-speaking countries, people often use some strategies in their discourse to enhance the effect of communication, i.e. to make communication more clear, effective or acceptable. However, there are some kinds of “strategies” which people use intentionally to achieve certain purposes like disguising meaning, misleading or cheating people, and ultimately to fake or even block the communication. Doublespeak, then, is one of these kinds of strategies.
As a matter of fact, many researches have been done on this kind of language phenomenon. For example, William Lutz, a professor of English at Rutgers University and a linguist, is famous for his bestselling book Doublespeak and other articles on this topic. In his works, Lutz divides doublespeak into four categories and demonstrates how doublespeak corrupts thoughts, impairs communication, and erodes trust.
However, researches on doublespeak in China is not as extensive as on other linguistic phenomena, and most of them are mainly focused on analyzing rhetorical devices of doublespeak such as personification, metaphor, understatement and exaggeration to pinpoint the negative influence of it. Yet few of these researches try to demonstrate the negative influence of doublespeak from the perspective of pragmatics. This paper, therefore, mainly deals with the phenomenon of doublespeak through pragmatic analysis. By studying the research results of those scholars, and collecting and analyzing the related data, this paper focuses on such aspects as what doublespeak is, why people use doublespeak, types of doublespeak, and how to tackle doublespeak.