A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Cultures In Vocabulary

Vocabulary is the basic unit of a language, and social and cultural differences can be displayed in lexical system. The associative meaning of a word is its cultural aspect and is influenced by culture seriously; thereby it should get special attention in the study of the relation between language and culture. The purpose of this thesis is to reveal the inseparable relationship between language and culture through the study of words' associative meaning, to reveal its significance in foreign language teaching.In order to know why we must understand culture when learning vocabulary, the thesis examines the relationship between language and culture: language is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it; it is influenced and shaped by culture; it reflects culture. Then it reviews culture teaching and culture teaching in vocabulary teaching. According to Leech's classification of meaning — conceptual meaning, associative meaning (connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning) and thematic meaning, the connotation of a word is different from its denotation — its explicit meaning. Next, Contrastive analysis hypothesis is discussed to show in English teaching and learning, a detailed contrastive study between English and Chinese is quite necessary because learners are inclined to transfer features of their native language into the target language, which often causes negative transfer.The most important part of the thesis is the third chapter, which takes case study as its focus content. This chapter analyses the associative meaning under four categories systematically. The first category is overlapping words: words with the same conceptual meaning and same or similar associative meaning. Since human beings, regardless of birth and culture, whatever language they speak and wherever they live, share certain perceptual dispositions and have a great deal in common. Thus, we can find equivalent counterparts between English and Chinese, such as sun, moon etc. This part discusses "spring" and "春"(beauty and vitality) in detail. However, because of different geography, custom, religion, value etc. many words are different in associative meaning, this can be reflected from the next three categories. The...