On Chinese College Students's Greetings From The Dynamic Adaptation Perspective

Greeting is an important speech act, the study of which has driven great attention as it is frequent in everyday social interactions all over the world. Appropriate greeting behavior is crucial for establishment and maintenance of interpersonal relationships.While greeting has been studied in disciplines such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, there has been no systematic investigation of their use in modern China context. In addition, different scholars hold different opinions upon the use frequency of some Chinese greeting patterns. Qian Housheng (1996) claims that Chinese students tend to greet in questioning forms, while Chen Jianmin(1994) and Qian Guanlian(1997) hold that the intellectual in China, influenced by the convention of international greetings, opt for the greeting pattern of giving regards directly. The difference in the use frequency of Chinese greeting patterns merits the present study. The author supposes that such a difference is mainly because of the fact that both the studies were done with a static approach.Using Verschueren's theory of Adaptation as the theoretical basis, the author constructs a tentative framework of the realization of greetings for describing and interpreting greeters' linguistic choice of greetings. Greetings in this thesis are understood as a process, which is a socially anchored form of behavior to acknowledge the sight of the greetee and this process is dynamic and adaptation-driven.Based on Hu and Grove's (1991) taxonomies of Chinese greetings, a questionnaire is designed, investigating whether relative power, social distance and the majors that the students specialize in have some influence on their greeting behaviors. After a survey done among two groups of college students, 1020 greetings are collected from the completed questionnaires and some of them are examined in detail.Using the data from the questionnaire survey, the present study makes an analysis of Chinese greetings, with a view to explaining the adaptive use of language in greetings. It has Chinese college students as its subjects, for most of the previous studies were done with the same type of subjects and, done quite some time ago and thus the results of those studies are now quite confusing.The results of this survey show that there is an overall tendency for the Chinese college students not to greet with the questioning pattern. Among the students being investigated, only 11.3% of the English majors and 14.3% of the non-English majors adopt the greeting pattern of questioning. Relative power, social distance and even the majors that the students specialize in have some influence on their greeting behaviors.It is shown that Chinese college students adapt their greeting behaviors to the social world—the setting of the students' social interactions, Chinese traditional culture, the social development of modern China and influences of western cultures.Detailed analysis and discussion of how the social world influences greeters' strategy-deciding and linguistic choice-making lead to the author's following conclusions: greeting is a dynamic process in which the greeter makes continuous choices either consciously or unconsciously for socio-cultural reasons; linguistic forms of greetings are synthesized in the process of interacting and interadapting of many factors in the social world.This study, investigating the characteristics of the greetings by Chinese college students, not only makes some contribution to the research of this speech act realization in contemporary China context, but also sheds light on cross-cultural communication studies and foreign language teaching.