The Cognitive Prominence of Euphemism Production: A Perspective of the Embodied-Cognitive Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The previous research on euphemism is mainly conducted from the perspectives of traditional linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and the philosophy of mind, but few studies focus on the cognitive prominence of euphemism production from the perspective of the embodied-cognitive approach. This paper takes the euphemisms in English literary works as the corpora and explores the cognitive prominence of euphemism production from the perspective of the embodied-cognitive approach to reveal the production mechanism of euphemism. It is found that euphemism production highlights the linguistic subject’s embodied cognition of identity, causal implication, and supervenience with reality. The linguistic subject’s embodied cognition of identity with reality explains that euphemism is in place of the common expression to direct at an unpleasant or embarrassing thing or event in reality because euphemism is identical to common expression. The linguistic subject’s embodied cognition of causal implication with reality accounts for the fact that the interaction between the mental and the physical follows the principle of causal interaction. Common expression causally implicates euphemism and the causal implication between them is restricted by the specific context and the linguistic subject’s intentionality. The linguistic subject’s embodied cognition of supervenience with reality indicates that the consciousness of the linguistic subject towards the described thing or event supervenes globally on its physical property. Euphemism production is the result of the linguistic subject’s embodied cognition with reality. Cognitive prominence from the perspective of the embodied-cognitive approach has very strong explanatory power over the production mechanism of linguistic expressions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".