A Contrastive Study Of Greetings In English And Chinese

Greeting may be defined as an episode of interaction between interactants in the beginning of face-to-face encounters to acknowledge each other's presence, to initiate and maintain interpersonal relationship, and to observe politeness. This paper is aimed at making a contrastive study of greetings in English and Chinese. It is found that there are no correlative studies between different types of greetings and various variables across cultures. Through the above contrastive study, we have some major findings as follows:Firstly, in accordance with the frequency of the chief types of routinized greetings, the ordering is: affirmation + an address→ question→ affirmation→ interjection →address in English and an address + an affirmation →an affirmation →　an address + a question →a question→ an address→ an interjection in Chinese respectively;Secondly, the higher the degree of familiarity between interactants is, the less formal the greeting type is;Thirdly, greetings in the form of affirmation become increasingly popular in China;Fourthly, in upward greetings, addressing is an indispensable norm and interjections seem inappropriate, which are often used in level greeting. That justifies the appropriateness of Brown and Levinson' s model in the choice of greeting strategies: X=D (S, H)+ P (H, S) +---.Fifthly, in both English and Chinese, greetings with addressing as intensifiers are perceived as receiving the highest degree of politeness;Sixthly, pragmatic failures in the use of English greetings are mainly reflected in degree of politeness, content and terms of address. Mistakes in politeness degree take up the highest percentage of the rate of pragmatic failure. Meanwhile, the causes for pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication are analyzed and some suggestions for EFL teaching are advanced as well.Finally, some future remarks are made with regard to enlarging the collection of corpora, taking more variables into consideration, investigating the non-verbal part of greetings and conducting a wider tentative cross-cultural study of greetings between Chinese Culture and other Western cultures or Asian cultures.