A Pragmatic Analysis On Taboos Between English And Chinese

With the economic and social globalization at the present time, the intercultural communication is becoming more frequent. As is known to all, language and culture intertwine with each other tightly, any ignorance of social customs and cultural values may not only cause communicative obstacles, but also likely bring about prejudice, offence, even hostility in cross-cultural communications.Language is a part of culture and also the carrier of culture. Taboo, as a special linguistic phenomenon, universally exists in every culture all over the world. There is no denying of the fact that taboo in different languages and cultures have great differences between one other. English and Chinese taboos manifest their different cultural backgrounds and social psychology. Thus, it is necessary for us to learn about verbal taboos, non-verbal taboos and knowledge of culture between English and Chinese in order to understand and get along well with people from other cultural backgrounds. In addition, verbal taboo refers to a word that is prohibited by the "polite" society from general use, however, as an aspect of language, taboo word also has some special functions, and consequently, in certain situational context, it can be regarded as one sort of communicative tool for interlocutors to achieve their intended purposes and to realize their pragmatic meanings during the language intercourse.Based on the achievements made by scholars of different fields, the present writer attempts to make a pragmatic analysis on taboos between English and Chinese. This thesis consists of six chapters in all: Chapter one, introduction of the thesis, gives a brief account of the motivation, previous study on taboo, and format of the paper. Chapter two is a general survey of taboo, delving into its definitions, features, and pragmatic functions respectively. Chapter three presents a review of relevant theories on pragmatics involving the politeness principle, the cooperative principle and contexts as the theoretical basis of the thesis. Chapter four, the core of this thesis, includes two parts, beginning with the theory concerning situational context, a great Chinese classic All Men Are Brothers (《水浒传》) is taken for the analysis so as to probe into what is the real purpose of using taboo by different characters and the pragmatic meaning of taboo words in specific situational contexts. Then the similarities and differences between English and Chinese taboos are to be explored from the aspect of cultural context in detail. It is known that causally using taboo words or taboo topics may cause misunderstanding, offence, even unfriendliness. Therefore, Chapter five, based on the previous chapters, offers some tentative suggestions on how to avoid taboo, and then the necessity of the present research will be explained. Chapter six is to conclude the whole thesis.To sum up, the purpose of analyzing English and Chinese taboos is to help interlocutors effectively communicate in cross-culture communications and to provide some suggestive advice for the English and Chinese translation practice, last but not the least, the author of this thesis hopes that it could be conducive to the foreign language teaching.