A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Based On The High And Low Context Theory

Language is the carrier of culture,and the impact of culture on a language is intrinsic.Although the contrastive studies of Chinese and English languages have a long history and the results are remarkable,they have been mostly done at the level of language structure or grammar rules.It is a meaningful attempt to re-know the differences between languages from the angle of a theory of culture.It can promote further understanding of language and culture.This study tries to conduct a contrastive analysis of morphology and syntax of Chinese and English languages based on the high and low context theory.According to Hall,Chinese culture belongs to high-context culture while English-speaking countries have he characteristics of the low-context culture.High-context culture and low-context culture have distinct differences.Some Chinese and English language phenomena reflect these differences.This study mainly employs the method of contrastive analysis.Materials in this study are selected mainly from dictionaries and famous monographs in the field of contrastive studies of Chinese and English.A systematic contrastive analysis is made of certain language phenomena,which reflect the characteristics of high and low context theory and tries to find out the reasons for the differences between the two languages.The contrastive study shows that some linguistic phenomena in Chinese reflects the characteristics of high-context culture:the understanding of the formation of Chinese characters and some sentence structures rely heavily on context.The formation of Chinese characters is a vivid example of high-context culture.The sentence relationship and sentential logic relation in Chinese are shown in an implicit way.On the contrary,the understanding of English words and sentence structures do not rely so heavily on context as those in Chinese.The affix system and part of speech of the words in English indicate meanings in an direct and explicit way.English sentences follow a strict rule in sentential form,reflecting the characteristics of low-context culture.