词汇,英汉文化差异的一面镜子

Lexis, a Mirror of Culture Gap between English and Chinese

任何语言都需依托于自己的文化背景。文化是民族差异的标志,而语言又像镜子一样将这种差异反映出来。因此,学习一门外语不仅仅是学习其语音、语法、词汇等体系,更意味着要学习目的语(targetlanguage)所反映的思想、风俗及社会行为方式。也就是说,学习其“内在语言”。词汇,尤其是实词,是语言的基本单位,最终也是文化的基本单位。通过英汉实词对比,不仅能反映出英汉两种文化的差别,反过来这些差别也能加深我们对英汉词汇的理解。通过考察词汇与文化的关系,本文总结了五种实词对比方式,旨在探索词汇与文化的关系,从而减少在跨文化交流中的文化误读现象。

Any language has its own cultural background.Culture is the mark of national gaps, while language is the mirror that reflects the gaps.Thereby, learning a foreign language means not only learning its systems of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, but also studying the ideology, customs and social behavior reflected in the target language, i.e.studying its 'inner language'.Words, esp.content words, are the essential units of a language, so they are in nature the essential units of a culture.A comparison between English and Chinese content words will not only reflect the culture gap between English and Chinese, the gap but in turn deepen the learners' understanding of the vocabulary of the two languages.Five types of comparison in content words are summed up in this paper, which aims at exploring the relationship between lexis and culture and then reducing the phenomena of cultural misunderstanding in communication between cultures.