The Study Of Lexical Gap In Intercultural Communication

Language is the carrier of a given culture, and also an indispensablecomponent of a given culture. Language can reflect and transmit cultural information,and different languages mirror different cultural traits. Chinese culture differs fromwestern culture in many aspects such as geography, history, religion, custom, valuesand so on.As the most active component of a language, word is the basic unit oflanguage building, and social and cultural differences can be displayed in lexicalsystems. In both English and Chinese, the cultural connotation of word is very rich,and many words cannot find their equivalents in the other language due to culturaldifferences. So a lexical gap exists in the two languages. Lexical gap will inevitablyresult in misunderstanding, which will in turn lead to various communication barriersbetween these two nations. With the fast development of international contacts,intercultural communication happens much more frequently than ever before.Therefore, to guarantee successful intercultural communication, various researcheson lexical gap should be done urgently.Many scholars have made a lot of contributions in this field, and theydiscussed lexical gap from different perspectives and focused on different aspects inthis fields. All of them made a lot of researches in this field. However, the past studiesare neither complete nor systematic. Overseas studies of "lexical gap" focus on otherlanguages except for Chinese. Domestic studies in this field paid more attention tothe relationship between lexical gap and translation, but they lack systematicresearch from the perspective of intercultural communication.Therefore, this research is of some importance. It attempts to explorelexical gaps from the intercultural communication perspective. Based on the vacancytheory and some other theories related to intercultural communication, the authoruse contrastive analysis approach to reveal the similarities and differences betweenChinese and English words in this thesis and analyze those factors leading to lexicalgaps, ultimately make some requirements of lexical gaps on intercultural communication.This thesis is divided into six parts. Chapter One contains the significanceand objectives of the thesis, the research method and structure of the thesis.Chapter Two represents the theoretical background of the thesis, such as the conceptof lexical gap and the vacancy theory, and reviews some related literatures. ChapterThree is about the classification of lexical gaps. The author first introduces someclassifications by other scholars, and put forward the classification in the author’spoint of view. The author divides the lexical gap into lexical gap proper andsemi-lexical gap by the approach of contrastive analysis between English and Chineselanguage. Chapter Four discusses the causes of lexical gap. The author analyses thecauses from the point of cultural differences, including the differences of history,geography, customs, social values and religious beliefs between the two countries.Chapter Five puts forward some requirements of dealing with lexical gaps onintercultural communication. The last chapter is the conclusion of this thesis, itsummarize the thesis, points out the limitations of the thesis and put forwards someproposals for future studies.