An Empirical Study Of English And Chinese Greetings From Sociocultural Perspective

As a universal phenomenon of human life, greeting is part of the daily encounters between people. It takes different forms, among which linguistic one is the most important. With sociocultural significance, its realization is usually language specific.The present thesis aims to undertake a quantitative and qualitative study on greeting between English and Chinese. The 13.0 version of SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) for Windows was applied to do the Independent-sample T-test, Descriptive Statistics and Frequencies so that it provides the scientific results as evidence.Interpretations for the differences in greetings between English and Chinese are provided and placed within the framework based on Leech's Politeness Principles, Brown and Levinson's Face Theory in English culture and Gu's politeness studies in Chinese culture. Besides, the thesis also covers conceptualization and categorization of greeting, exploration of the differences in content, frequency of use, degree of politeness and address terms as greetings as well as factors such as social, cultural and philosophical ones that cause the differences.The present study indicates that great differences can be found in the contents, the frequency, degree of politeness, distribution of greeting and its use in the form of address terms between English and Chinese. Linguistic routines of greeting, far from being relatively meaningless and mechanical social behavior, can be understood as extremely important strategies for...