A Study On Cultural Connotation's Transfer Of English And Chinese Vocabulary

Language transfer is the central issue in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and language learning (Odlin, 1989). Since its appearance in the 1960s, with the change of the major theory in second language acquisition, the theory of language transfer has also experienced ups and downs. Nowadays, the more comprehensive understanding towards this term has been made by linguistics: Transfer is learners'cognitive strategy to use their L1 as a resource in L2 learning. It occurs only when L2 learners do not have sufficient acquired knowledge of the target language for their purpose or they believe L1 can help them to infer the L2 features. (Kellerman, 1987:119)English and Chinese, as languages with a long history, both have treasured lexical cultures. However, the learning of cultural connotation of vocabulary is always the neglected part in second language acquisition. Learners, even teachers spend a lot of time and energy on grammar or the enlargement of vocabulary, but they seldom combine word learning with the cultural background of the target language. So, the English that Chinese learners produce is sometimes the English form with Chinese way of thinking. Therefore, the study on cultural connotation's transfer of vocabulary is of great significance.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One discusses the transferred problems that Chinese learners encounter when learning English, which indicates the necessity of this thesis. Chapter Two first defines some basic terms in the thesis, and then discusses the developmental course transfer theory experienced. Based on contrastive analysis and Kellerman's Psychotypoligical...