Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: Verbal taboo is a common social phenomenon. In English and Chinese, some verbal taboos are similar, some have their respective characteristics owing to their different culture backgrounds. This paper first compares the similarities and differences of verbal taboo between English and Chinese from five aspects, such as religion and belief, disease and death, social status, privacy and “ist” words. Futhermore, it explores the causes of differences from the perspective of culture, that is, political and religious background, ways of thinking and social values and ethics. Fnally, this paper suggests four main measures to avoid using verbal taboo, hoping that it can help English learners understand and master English verbal taboo in order to do better in cross-cultural communication.

Key words: verbal taboo;cultural differences; comparison; cross-cultural communication

摘要：  语言禁忌是一种普遍存在的社会现象。在英汉两种语言中，有些语言禁忌是一致的，有些则因文化背景的不同而带有各自的特征。本文首先对比了英汉语言禁忌在宗教与信仰、疾病与死亡、社会地位、个人隐私及“ist”词语等方面存在的异同，接着从政教背景、思维方式和社会价值观和道德观方面分析了产生这些差异的原因，进而提出四种有效避免使用禁忌语的方法，希望能帮助英语学习者了解和掌握英语语言禁忌，以期跨文化交流顺利进行。

关键词：语言禁忌；文化差异；比较；跨文化交际

1.Introduction
Nowadays, taboo has become a commonly used word in anthropology, studies of religion and folk custom. Furthermore, it has been a fairly important field of these branches of study. Taboo exists in all known cultures, referring to certain acts, objects, or relationships which society wishes to avoid and thus the language used to talk about them. All the taboos are important, worthwhile, dangerous, inviolable, obscene and not spoken directly.      
Verbal taboo is an essential part of taboo. It is generally related to sex, the supernatural, excretion ,and death, but quite very often they extend to other aspects of domestic and social life. With regard to verbal taboo, Ronald Wardhaugh points out that when people use language to convey their thoughts they all try to avoid talking about some inelegant topics or things and that those words or phrases which can give rise to unpleasant or even embarrassed feelings are called verbal taboos. Ever since 1980s, articles with regard to verbal taboos spring up like mushrooms in China. Chen Yuan ays verbal taboo also contains two aspects: One is fetishism of language; the other one is prohibition or substitution of language. Deng Yanchang discussed the discrepancy of English and Chinese taboos in detail from the view of language and culture.