中西方动物词汇内涵差异的对比研究 -.docVIP

【标题】中西方动物词汇内涵差异的对比研究 【作者】罗岚枫 【关键词】动物词汇；文化内涵；文化差异 【指导老师】程 琼 张 婕 【专业】英语 【正文】Ⅰ. IntroductionIn discussing cultural connotation of animal words, it is indispensable to refer to the concept of culture. In order to give an explicit and rigorous definition of the cultural connotation of a word, we should first make clear what culture means. Although so far people have not reached a unanimous scientific agreement on the definition of?“culture”, it has been universally acknowledged that culture is related to almost every aspect of our life. Sir Edward Taylor, the well-known British anthropologist in the 19th century, defined culture in his Primitive Culture as?“complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, laws, customs and any other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”1 This classic definition tells us what culture is in a broad sense. In his An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Wardhaugh said that he agreed to Goodenough’s definition of culture that?“a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and to do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves”2?, thus he considered that culture is the knowledge that a person must possess to get through the task of daily life, or whatever a person must know in order to function in a particular society.?The long process of development, animals and human beings have been maintained close contact with each other, which has profound significance to human beings’ existence and development. Language vocabulary reflects the differences in cultural development. Because of such aspects of cultural factors as the different histories, customs, values, religious beliefs, both English and Chinese vocabulary gave animal-related words their specific cultural connotations. As we all know, in different languages and different cultural backgrounds, each word not only have literal meaning, but also