A Cross-cultural Comparative Study Of Taboos In Chinese And American Sitcoms

With the development of globalization, international communication has been intensified. Itcontributes a lot to mutual development. However, a series of problems and even conflict arecaused. Therefore, people should pay more attention and do more researches on differentcultures. In this way can we lessen or avoid the misunderstandings and communicate in a moreeffective way. Linguistic taboo, as a most important part of a language in the culture, is alanguage phenomenon that exists widely in the human society in all cultures. Yet, people areprohibited on different things as taboos in different cultures, and different even on the same thing,there would be on the different level of taboo. Therefore, the ignorance of linguistic taboos in thetarget culture may lead to intercultural communicative failure and even cause more seriousconsequences.With regard to the study of linguistic taboos, a sheer amount of contributions were made inthe world. In China, this topic is more strictly forbidden duo to the deep influence of feudalistideology. Studies in this area may be later and fewer that those in the west. From the1980s,linguistic researchers became greatly interested in this field. However, there are still some areaswe haven’t made deep researches. E.g. there are still seldom studies on taboos and context.Besides, the comparative taboo studies between different cultures mainly adopt qualitativeanalysis. Quantitative studies on taboo are still rare, with the only method of “questionnaire”.Therefore, this study will start form this point, to make an intercultural communicative studybetween Chinese and American taboos. My study is a quantitative research with the datacollected from six Chinese and American sitcoms. Based on data analysis as well as previousstudies, my thesis aims at summarizing and analyzing the Chinese and English linguistic taboosrespectively and most importantly the similarities and differences of Chinese and Englishlinguistic taboos.According to the study, I mainly divide the linguistic taboos into three categories: taboos onvulgarities, on ominous matters and taboos on desecration. The differences between Chinese andAmerican linguistic taboos should be paid more attention in cross-cultural communication: firstly,taboos on sex and sexual organs are almost completely prohibited; the taboos on desecrationsdiffer in English and Chinese; taboos on naming and addressing are stricter in Chinese, and so on.In daily communication, people tend to avoid using linguistic taboos; however, taboo wordssometimes cannot be avoided. Thus, an appropriate attitude towards linguistic taboos and someuseful strategies are given on my paper, based on the analysis of the pragmatic functions oflinguistic taboos. This study is expected to offer some help for intercultural communication as well as teaching. What’s more, it will help communicate more fluently and effectively.