摘 要

禁忌语是存在于人类社会的一种文化现象，与人类的日常生活休戚相关。随着现代社会的发展，禁忌语在跨文化交际中发挥着越来越重要的职能。语言是文化的镜子。禁忌语作为语言与文化的重要组成部分，在跨文化交际中起着至关重要的作用。所以对英汉禁忌语的研究不仅有助于更好地掌握不同的文化，还推动了跨文化交际的顺利实现。因此禁忌语的研究就显得至关重要。

本篇论文中，作者从定义，形成因素对禁忌语进行了一般性概述，继而以大量的早期研究为基础从语言与文化的角度分析英汉禁忌语。通过分析研究作者发现了英汉禁忌语在同音异形词以及一些特殊词汇方面的相同之处。同时也发现了禁忌语在隐私、命名、种族和性别、数字及颜色、动物和植物等方面的不同之处。通过对比分析英汉禁忌语，我们可以更好的理解以及运用禁忌语以推动不同文化之间的相互交流。

关键词: 语言 文化 禁忌语 异同

1. Introduction

Language and culture are intertwined. Different languages reflect different cultures and different cultures have different taboos. As an essential part of language and culture, taboo mirrors different cultural backgrounds, histories, customs and values. And the characteristic of Chinese culture is universal and Western culture is individual, accordingly, the taboo which reflects these cultural characteristics has similarity and difference. Knowing the similarities and the differences of taboos can not only help us to understand the Chinese and Western cultures but also achieve an effective intercultural communication successfully.

Taboo is a complicated linguistic phenomenon, which commonly exists in human society and plays a vital role in intercultural communication. Intercultural communication is a kind of activity in which people who come from different cultures and languages make a communication. Language is a carrier of culture, and linguistic taboo is a kind of special phenomenon in English and Chinese cultures. With the rapid development of technology and economy, the relationship between every nation is becoming increasingly close. People with different cultural backgrounds will come across various questions in intercultural communication. All of these questions will impede the smooth progress of conversation in the intercultural communication. Among them, the primary cause that hinders the smooth communication is the difference between language and culture. As a component part of human language, taboo plays a crucial role in human communication. In the meanwhile, taboo is a very sensitive topic in human conversation and set barrier to intercultural communication. In the intercultural communication, if we violate the taboos of others, it will lead to misunderstanding and termination of the conversation. In consequence, it is very important to study taboos in English and Chinese. Only by learning different taboos, people can avoid conflicts and obstacles and promote the progress of smooth communication.

In general, this paper mainly focuses on the analysis of taboos between English and Chinese. More importantly, the author observes some similarities in homophonic words and some special words and dissimilarities in the area of privacy, naming, race and gender, number and color and animal and plant in taboos from many aspects between English and Chinese in this paper, and people can clearly know the different taboos from different cultural backgrounds. Thus, it is of great significance to study taboos.

1. Literature Review

2.1 Language, culture and taboos

Language plays a very important role in human activity and is an essential ingredient of human society. Nevertheless, the linguistic phenomenon is so arcane that human beings do not understand it completely until now. Since antiquity, there have emerged many schools of linguistics. In the beginning of the 20^th century, linguists stress on the social identities of language and consider that language closely connect with the social environment. So we must take language as a social science and study it in the sociocultural environment.

Tylor (1917), a great anthropologist, once makes a famous definition about culture in Primitive Culture: “culture is a synthesis that includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, law, customs and people’s ability and habits.” (1871:14) In Modern Chinese Dictionary, “culture is the creation of human beings, and also the sum of material and spiritual wealth during the process of creating the nature, such as the literature, art, education, science and so on”. (1978:501) Also, Williams (1988) once called culture “the way of life for an entire society”. As a whole, culture includes codes of manners, dress, language, religion, rituals, norms of behavior, such as law and morality and systems of belief as well as the art.

Taboo is an essential part both in language and culture. Taboo is a kind of social psychological phenomenon and is a self-limitation to people’s behavior. And there are many definitions about taboo in dictionaries. For example, in Oxford English Dictionary, taboo is defined as the words likely to be considered offensive, shocking or indecent by certain people. The Modern Chinese Dictionary defines taboo as the prohibitive word or action. Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines taboo as a prohibition imposed on social customs or a protective measure. And Wardhaugh (2006) defines linguistic taboo in An Introduction to Socio-Linguistics that Language is a vehicle for communicating thoughts, nevertheless, people usually try to avoid mentioning scandalous topics and words in the communication and they call these defamatory topics and words as linguistic taboo. From the above definitions, we can conclude that the linguistic taboo is a verbal form of social taboos, referring to those words which are considered to be annoying, disgusting, threatening or insulting. These words are impolite to be mentioned in communication, especially in the “polite company”.

Taboo is closely associated with religion, national customs and cultural psychology. Linguistic taboo is characteristic of nationality: “language is a symbol of culture, and influenced and shaped by culture.” (Xing 1990) The culture of one nation can be reflected from the language, without exception, in the behind of linguistic taboos must hide certain cultures. However, every mode of culture of each nation has their own characteristics, so in different values, customs, social systems and life pattern can manifest the difference of linguistic taboos. For example, the word “Goldlion” is a famous brand of shirt in English, but in China it is a taboo word because of the literal translation of “Goldlion” is “金狮”. In Chinese the pronunciation of “狮” is the same as “死”. So in the intercultural communication, we should master the language and culture of others first, and then learn their taboos through their language and culture.

2.2 The formative factors of taboos

2.2.1 Psychological factors

Language is arbitrary for it is produced by human beings in the long process of production. As an external stimulus, language is influenced by human emotions and psychology to a certain degree. The book Language in Thinking and Behavior indicates that a word generally includes two meanings: information meaning and emotional meaning. For example, in English, the meaning of “die” and “pass on” is death. The emotional meaning of “pass on” is positive and it is easy to accept, but the word “die” is negative and it is rejected by people. This phenomenon shows that language can affect people's emotion and psychology, and psychological factors restrict the use of language. Equally, the formation of taboo is bound to be restricted by psychological factors.