A Study Of Meaning Description Of Culture-bound Words In Chinese-english Dictionaries

Language reflects, records and spreads culture. On the one hand, language connotes the historical and cultural backgrounds of this community, and people’s ways of living and thinking as well. On the other hand, language has been recorded in dictionaries in the long track of history.English learner’s dictionaries are the representative of current learner’s dictionary. From the day they came into being in1930s, they have met with great commercial success. What’s more, they have brought forth innovative thoughts to old traditional lexicography. While in China, with the advent of the21st century, the compilation of bilingual dictionary reaches an unprecedented level. As an indispensable tool for foreign learners of Chinese, current Chinese-English dictionaries are unable to meet the requirements of foreign learners’language production and problem solving. Therefore, it becomes imperative to find out and make analysis of existing problems in current Chinese-English dictionaries. Due to the particular cultural attributes of culture-bound words, studies of culture-bound words have their own merits. However, problems are inevitably common in these practices. Among those problems is how to unfold before people’s eyes not only its worldliness, but also its national character.The newly-developed cultural schema theory has great significance for cross-cultural activities such as foreign language acquisition, translation as well as international communication. In particular, it finds its way into culture, which remains an unsolved puzzle in the field of dictionary making.The innovative aspect of this present thesis lies in the perspective of the cultural schema theory which attempts to make a different analysis of meaning description of culture-bound words, In addition, the avoidance of ethnocentrism by NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) better supports the emphasis on cultural elements in the cultural schema theory.In this thesis, after probing into the nature and principles of meaning description, the author applies the cultural schema theory and works within the cognitive framework, attempting to dissect the meaning description of culture-bound words in several dimensions for the purpose of giving valuable suggestions for Chinese-English dictionary compilation and meaning description of culture-bound words.