An Analysis Of Culture-gapped Words In Cultural Vacancy From An Intercultural Communication Perspective

Similarities, together with the general characters of culture constitute the cultural generality, while each culture has its specific characteristics, which cannot be bypassed and superseded no matter how trivial they could be identified. Due to cultural differences in historical background, social customs, religious beliefs and ideology, each nation is peculiar about certain objects and concepts which cannot be found equivalence or corresponding expressions in other languages, which brings forth many issues that need to be addressed. One of them is "cultural vacancy", which is viewed as one of the main obstacles to intercultural communication. On the one hand, Western cultures have been gradually acknowledged and accepted through cultural interfusion; on the other hand, it is urgent to spread some unique Chinese culture to the outside world, which is a big challenge for translators, language learners and educators.As the mirror or index to a given culture, vocabulary or lexicon is the basic foundation to language building and is influenced and confined by religious beliefs, social customs, values and aesthetic attitudes of a given nation. Culturally-loaded words especially culture-gapped words are the most sensitive language items and directly reflect a nation's unique culture. At abroad, the correlated researches on culture-gapped words are confined to the contrastive studies on German, French, Russian, Japanese and English. At home, scholars' studies are confined to contrastive study of phonetics, rhetoric, cognitive patterns in English and Chinese. The author of the thesis aims at revealing the phenomenon of "cultural vacancy" by making an analysis of culture-gapped words in English and Chinese from an intercultural communication perspective.The thesis is divided into four parts. Chapter one is the general introduction in which purpose of the study, significance of study, status quo of the study and the research method are introduced. Chapter two focuses on cultural vacancy and lexical gaps in Chinese and English from an intercultural communication perspective. In this part, the author shed light on the interrelationship of cultural vacancy, lexical gaps and communication between cultures. Chapter three deals with approaches to cultural vacancy and culture-gapped words for the purpose of promoting communication between cultures. The author believes that enhancing the contrastive study ofculture-gapped words of cultural vacancy in Chinese and English would contribute greatly to the successful intercultural communication between China and English-speaking countries. Chapter four is the conclusion of the whole thesis.The study on cultural vacancy and culture-gapped words in this thesis will provide a new angle for the correlated studied in this field, which would contribute much to the better cultural understanding in terms of promoting intercultural communication. Secondly, it is of great significance to foreign language teaching (TCFL and TEFL) and C-E or E-C translation practice.