A Contrastive Study of Chinese and English Taboos in the Context of Intercultural Communication开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义

Language is created during the process of human activities and since the day it was created, it has worked as a tool of communication to transfer information between people. Every nation has its own language. However, there is a common cultural phenomenon in every language, that is, taboo. As intercultural communication is essential in a world of economic globalization, it is of great importance to do a research on the comparison of taboos indifferent cultures in order to diminish the failure in the cross-culture communication. This paper, through the contrastive study of Chinese and English taboos, tries to analyze the similarities and differences of the two languages, aiming to help people have a deep understanding of the two cultures and improve their ability of intercultural communication.

2. 研究内容和预期目标

With the development of globalization, people with different culture backgrounds need to communicate with each other. To avoid misunderstanding and conflicts, people should pay more attention to taboos in different cultures. This paper will focus on the contrastive analysis between Chinese and English taboos and tries to help people have a deep understanding of two cultures. In this paper, the author tries to compare Chinese and English taboos about their similarities as well as differences by applying cooperative principle and politeness principle. The author also tries to analyze the culture causes behind the similarities and differences in the context of intercultural communication in the hope of arousing people#8217;s attention to this important problem and making them aware of proper use of language so that they can be successful in intercultural communication.

3. 国内外研究现状

Foreign scholars got in touch with taboos earlier than Chinese Scholars. In early times, Sigmund Freud had made a great contribution to taboos. His book Totem and Taboos published in 1913, focusing on the formation of taboos. And the book Truth and Religion which was published in 1967 by Frenz Baermann Steiner provides the whole history of the origin of the word #8220;taboos#8221;. It also contains the meaning, significance and the function of the word in relevance to anthropological and psychological theories. Handbook of the Indians of California written by A.L.Kroeber in 1925 and Language and their speakers written by T.Shopen in 1979 are important works connected with taboos. Both of them talk about the restriction of taboos. Since the 1960s, a study focusing on the relationship between language and society, namely sociolinguistics, began to develop and attracted people#8217;s attention. So in that period, a large number of sociolinguistics works emerged, such as An introduction to Language written by Fromik, Rodman and Hyams. This book points out that taboo is a ban or prohibition on some words offensive or something that will make people disgusting.

The study about taboos started at home in 1980s. And scholars have made a mature study on it through 30years of development, especially in the aspect of of contrastive study on Chinese and English Taboos and the relationship between taboos and culture. The earliest literature that provides a comprehensive analysis of linguistic taboos is Sociolinguistics, published by Chen Yuan in 1982. In 1986, Chen Jianmin#8217;s New Explorations on Language, Culture and Society came out. This book analyzed the linguistic taboos from the perspective of the language and society. Folk Linguistic written by Qu Yanbin was published in 1992. It studied taboos from the aspect of folklores.

4. 计划与进度安排

abstract

chapter Ⅰ introduction

1.1 general description of the study

5. 参考文献

[1] asante, m.k. newmark, e.,blake, c.a. handbook of intercultural communication [m]. london: sage publication/beverly hills, 1982

[2] gary, ferraro. cultural anthropology: an applied perspective [m]. belmont, ca: wadsworth, 2004

[3] hudson, r.a. sociolinguistics [m]. london: cambridge university press, 1982