A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Taboos In The Context Of Intercultural Communication

With the advancement of globalization, interactions between cultures have been increasingly intensified, which produce both better understandings and new problems. It proves to be an imperative to identify both differences and similarities so that effective strategies might be formulated to deal with the challenges.Language reflects culture and is significantly shaped by culture. Without understanding of the social-cultural or communication context, we cannot understand the meaning of language. Plenty of studies have addressed the relationships between language and culture, but few of them comprehensively interpret how cultural orientation affects linguistic taboo in social and intercultural communications.This thesis takes pragmatic and intercultural communication theories as the backbone and incorporates some anthropological and sociolinguistic ideas to analyze linguistic taboos in Chinese and English. It reveals their differences and tentatively proposes workable strategies to improve intercultural taboo competence. Taboo refers to social disapproval of certain kinds of behavior believed to be harmful to its members. It is principally expressed in prohibitions and restrictions. Different cultures do not all agree on what taboo is and what should be tabooed in a given context. Both Chinese and English have taboos on such things as sex, death, religion, superstition and so forth, but they follow different cultural norms. Chinese culture tends to encourage negative use of language taboos, whereas English culture tends to prefer positive use of language taboos. Taboos in Chinese and English originate from different religious traditions. Intercultural taboo competence covers attitudes, intercultural/global thought, appreciating/digesting differences, recognizing/tolerating ambiguity and being nonjudgemental constitute taboo competence in the global era. Cognitive-behavioral management, question-asking, self-revealing, euphemism and vagueness are useful strategies to achieve successful intercultural communication.