In English And Chinese Communication Semantics Migration

Social convention, value concept and thinking mode often exert great influence on the understanding of utterance meaning. In interactions involving speakers who do not have adequate cultural knowledge of their counterpart, discrepancy between utterance meaning and language meaning under different contexts may occur, the result of which is semantic shifts between semantic utterance information and pragmatic utterance information.Context of culture and context of situation are two main factors for semantic shifts. The complexity of these two factors in dynamic interactions usually leads to semantic shifts of utterance meaning, especially between speakers and hearers. In communication between members from different backgrounds, the semantic and pragmatic utterance meaning often need to be enriched, either pragmatic narrowing or pragmatic broadening, based on the context of culture and context of situation involved.