A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Death Euphemism

Euphemism, as one kind of cultural words, often causes misunderstandings in communication, especially in bilingual communication. One reason lies in the lack of knowledge of features and formation of euphemism; the other lies in the lack of related cultural knowledge. Most current studies on euphemism discussed it from perspectives of lexicology, social linguistics, pragmatics and so on. Comparatively speaking, studies from the perspective of cross-cultural communication are rare, let alone the specific research on one concrete subject. In these limited studies, subjectiveconclusions are more than objective supports from statistical data and experimental results. Cross-cultural communication mainly studies cultural comparison. The cultural connotation of words is one important part in the study. This thesis selects euphemism as the object of study and makes a cross-cultural study specifically on death euphemism to explore the cultural differences beneath the differences in language. The purpose of the study is to help students understand the deep cultural factors beneath the various kinds of expressions, reduce misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication and offer examples for culture teaching.English and Chinese euphemisms share similarities as well as differences in many aspects. This thesis compares conceptual meanings and cultural connotative meanings of death euphemisms and explores the cultural roots beneath the language differences. Death euphemisms studied in this thesis are collected from two dictionaries of Liu Chunbao and Zhang Gonggui. Based on the theories of contrastive linguistics and Professors Deng Yanchang and Liu Runqing's theories of bilingual comparison of words, this thesis first makes quantitative analysis of the death euphemism meanings and then digs the cultural reasons by qualitative analysis.All the entries are classified according to the four corresponding modes of word meaning: superposition, conflict, correspondence and vacancy. It can be concluded that differences are more than similarities in word meaning. Five reasons are finally generated to account for the differences in cultural connotation: different natural environments, different cultural traditions and values, different types of thinking, different aesthetic mental sets and communicative values plus different language systems, cultural contexts and communicative strategies.