Keywords
Abstract
The article examines the structural and semantic organisation of euphemisms in modern political English discourse. Applying descriptive, contextual and structural-semantic methods to a corpus of approximately 150 euphemistic units taken from British and American political speeches, press briefings and media commentaries published between 2015 and 2025, the study identifies three main structural levels of euphemisation – word, phrase and sentence – and four dominant semantic mechanisms: metaphor, metonymy, generalisation and understatement. The results are supported by two tables and three figures visualising the taxonomy, the distribution of structural types and the share of semantic mechanisms.
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