A Contrastive Analysis of Connotations of “蛇(she)” and “Snake”

A certain group of cultural loaded words in the same language can form a vocabulary category. In order to facilitate systematic and refined research work, language researchers tend to classify the vocabulary which belongs to the same category systematically that provides possibility for cross cultural research of language. Regardless of different points of view, it has been widely recognized that culture has taken an important place in foreign language teaching and learning studies. As an important category of the vocabulary of a language, animal expression is not only an indispensable part of human language, but also conveys cultural messages to people from different cultures. Words evolve over time, semantic shifting, generalizing, progressing, drifting. Although snake falls in the commendatory, neutral and derogatory category in English as well as in Chinese, its derogatory connotation has been highly stressed both in English and Chinese with the rapid process of globalization and human cognitive development. In an attempt to enhance cross cultural awareness of L2/FL instructors and learners and improve their foreign language proficiency, this paper presents an exclusive study of different cultural connotations between “Snake” and “蛇” by virtue of contrastive analysis, corpora collecting and Associative Group Analysis.