Differences In Cultural Contexts Of Indirectness Between Chinese And English

The sociolinguistic perspective perceives language as social behavior covaries with its cultural context, which suggests that understanding a language also means interpreting its social or cultural meaning. As an important language phenomenon, indirectness universally exists in communication. Yet indirectness is culturally bound. In Chinese and English cultures, the diversities in cultural context often lead to the differences in standards of judgment and patterns of realization of indirectness, from which the cross-cultural communicative failure stems.In this dissertation, we compare Chinese indirectness with English indirectness from the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic perspectives and trace the cultural factors causing their differences by comparing cultural context in the two cultures. Besides we explore pragmatic failures of indirectness on the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic levels, which further proves that diversities in cultural context are rooted sources for pragmatic failures of indirectness in intercultural communication. Thus, we suggest that understanding the diversities in cultural context be the precondition for successful realization of indirectness in communication between Chinese and English people. This dissertation falls into seven chapters with respective focuses of their own:...