The Influence Of Chinese & English Cultural Differences On Language Form & Word Meaning

The relationship between language and culture is a common concern in humanities. Language is a social phenomenon and also a cultural phenomenon. Language and culture rely on each other and influence each other. They are closely related to each other. The formation and development of language can not happen without culture. Language is the product of culture and also the medium of culture. Therefore, on the one hand, without the knowledge of culture, we can not have a good command of language; on the other hand, if speaking language without the awareness of culture, we would not be accepted or even melted by the culture that we want to live in. This is the point that the thesis aims to reveal.In recent twenty years, many Chinese linguists compared Chinese with English mainly from two perspectives. One is from the perspective of the internal structure of language, such as phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, discourse and text. These researches are rarely related to the outer factors of language, such as culture and society. The other is from the perspective of the outer elements of language, especially society, culture, psychology and history. But these researches generally focus on just one certain aspect of language, such as the comparison of word meaning, syntax or language typology from the perspective of culture. So that fails to give an overall view about how cultural differences influence language differences and those researches are not systematic. Here the author tries to make a more detailed and systematic analysis of how Chinese & English cultural differences influence their languages from the perspective of the relationships between culture, thought and language and to dig out the cultural differences which lie behind linguistic differences. Language contains form and meaning—these two aspects. And word meaning is the basic unit of language meaning. As language contains a very broad scope and due to the limitation of the thesis length, the author narrows the scope and only studies two points, i.e., language form and word meaning.By cultural exploration, the author holds that the striking differences between Chinese and English in terms of language form and word meaning can be traced back to the different natural surroundings, social values, thinking modes as well as legends, myth, histories, literatures, religions and all differences of social life between these two distant nations. And all of these can be grouped under the heading of culture.