Political Language under Pragmatic Scrutiny: A Euphemistic Analysis of Boris Johnson Three-Tier Covid-19 National Lockdown Announcements

Abstract

More than a year elapsed since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak all over the world including the United Kingdom. Unprecedentedly, several measures were accounted for in all life domains in order to contain the spread of the virus and adhere to its pervasive nature in a hopeful attempt for survival. So far, Politics and politicians have been under scrutiny from several sectors in society to counteract the ferocity of the Coronavirus extend and its detrimental effects on the normal flow of life. In UK, British citizens desperately anticipated behind their screens the news briefings in which the Prime Minister Boris Johnson updates his people on the high-level of Covid-19 stats that launched a decision towards UK confinement. Therefore, the present research aims at pragmatically analyzing Johnson’s three-tier national lockdown announcements during Covid-19 outbreak vis-à-vis the use of the highlighted 13 types of Euphemism along with its six functions. Thus, the objective of the study is to uncover the functional power Euphemism displayed in the PM speeches based on the frequent use of Euphemism. It therefore follows a quantitative-qualitative analysis of the three lockdown announcement speeches which revealed that six types of euphemism were used to imply positive intentions, whereas four types served a negative function and meaning.