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onfigurative and does not associate with objective things. Conceptual meaning is the core factor of communication. Communication conflicts may caused by misunderstanding the conceptual meaning. For example: the English word “uncle” can refer to “舅舅” “叔叔” “姨夫” in Chinese. So readers can only rely on the context to decide whom “uncle” refers to. It’s similar to other appellation words such as “grandfather, father-in-law, and cousin”. Take another word “drugstore” for example. In China, we may think it means “药店”, but in American, in “drugstore”, besides medicine, there are food, soft drink and other things for sale.
2.      Connotative meaning
It is beyond conceptual meaning, which has relation with the nature and characteristic of objective things. For example, “idealism” has two means in English. One is philosophical theory that ideas are the only reality, without any disputable evaluation. But in Chinese, it’s a derogatory word. The other meaning is “impracticality by virtue of thinking of things in their ideal form rather than as they really are.” It’s an expression of affirmative or negative. While in China it has derogatory meanings. There are some other words like this, such as “intellectual” and “peasant”.
3.      Collocative meaning
It’s mainly referring to the lateral syntagmatic relations between word and word. Collocative is established by usage. The mixing regularity of our native language should not be used in target language. Such as “红茶” is not “red-tea” but “black-tea”, “浓咖啡” is not “strong coffee” but “black coffee”, “浓茶” is “strong tea”.
From the above discussion we know that a word usually has conceptual meaning, connotative meaning and collocative meaning. All these meanings of a word that invariably become in the way of readers’ comprehension.
3.3 Cultural Differences and Comprehension of Phrases and Expressions
Cultural differences are by no means confined to words. They are also reflected by phrases and expressions as well. And cultural differences reflected by phrases and expressions in two languages can also affect readers’ EFL reading comprehension. The phrases and expressions mentioned here refer to idioms and allusions. Idioms are combination of words, the meaning of which cannot be determined from the meanings of the individual words. Idioms are culture-specific expressions, and they contain profound cultural connotations. Because of cultural differences, idioms are hard to understand. For example, the Chinese equivalent for “the end of the world” is “世界末日”. The English idiom “the end of the world” comes from Christianity and means that the present world is sure to come to an end one day. God will divide people into good ones who will go to Heaven and bad ones who will go to Hell. It urges people to do good deeds. But to Chinese, “世界末日” means that one day the world will be destroyed and every thing will disappear from the world, so we should not be too thrifty; instead, we should be extravagant and try our best to enjoy ourselves.
Writings in English abound with allusions, which are a means by which people embellish their writing with references to characters or events from their history, legends, literature, religion, etc. allusions are also a reflection of the rich cultural heritage of the people who speak language. Many English allusions are not always easy for Chinese readers to understand due to cultural differences. Fo本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。