A Study Of Culture-specific Expressions In Chinese And English From The Perspective Of National-Cultural Semantics

Most of the set phrases and expressions such as idioms, proverbs, and allusions are culturally loaded. Their specialties in form greatly enrich the language of a nation, but the national-culture they carry impedes the understanding in interlingual communication. This thesis, the Study of Culture-specific Expressions in Chinese and English from the Perspective of National-Cultural Semantics, aims to make a survey of the special language forms and their motivation and show the possibility of inter-cultural communication. Culture-specific expressions in both Chinese and English embody all the characteristics of idioms, proverbs, allusions and common sayings. An idiom is a set phrase with a meaning of its own that is different from the meaning of each separate word put together. A proverb is at least a sentence which displays some principle and truth. Allusions, stable in form, use the past to disparage the present. Common sayings, varying in form, are conventional. Culture-specific expressions are both traditionally and conventionally formed. They reflect the history, religion and social life of a nation. That is why they have national-cultural meanings. Motivation aspects show that the same physiology and physical world result in similarities in different languages. It is culture-specific expressions that contain most of the differences of nationality, value and language system. Research shows that we can obtain an equivalent understanding by analyzing the culture-specific expressions of different languages though they have no equivalent forms. As linguists present, language is both conventional and somewhat innate.