A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Greetings

Greetings are the most common tools of communication in people's daily life. In one speech community, the using of greetings represents a kind of unconscious social conventions by the members; whereas, in intercultural communication, failures are often made. In recent years, many scholars do researches on these failures made by people who speak different languages in different cultures, but most of them study the failures in intercultural perspective, and seldom scholars study the failures made by Chinese people in using of English greetings in the perspective of linguistics.In this article, some theories of linguistics are used to make the comparison between English and Chinese greetings, and greetings are divided into three parts: salutation, address from and body language. Salutations and address forms are discussed from these perspectives: semantics, syntax and pragmatics. These three disciplines view salutations across a spectrum of proximity from micro to macro. As to body language, it's non-verbal communication and it's difficult to describe it from the perspective of linguistics; therefore, it is not the emphasis of our discussion.This article focuses on the pragmatic analyses of greetings. Pragmatics is a new-born discipline in linguistics, and it is the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and thecontexts and situations in which they are used. Some theories of pragmatics help us a lot.The main theories involved in this article are Austin's Speech Act Theory, Leech's Politeness Principle, etc. Using these theories, we make a study in comparison between English and Chinese on linguistic routines and politeness of greetings. The comparisons of the structural features, social functions, and vocabularies of English and Chinese greetings and partings are included. The article gives a quantificational analysis, based on a language survey, on the differences such as different ways of expressing and their users; illustrates the common mistakes made by Chinese students in using English greetings; and finally give some suggestions on the College English Teaching.