A Study On Pragmatics Of Chinese Greeting Terms And Teaching Strategies

This paper first analyzes Chinese greeting as a linguistic phenomenon from the pragmatic point of view, classifying them into five types: the type of using terms of address, the type of using greeting terms, improvising, enquiring and deriding. Then, it discusses three pragmatic conditions that influence the use of Chinese greeting terms from the point of view of the cross-cultural communication, namely ethnic cultural words, situational context, and semantic limitation. Based on these, the author, by adopting the quantitative analysis, carried out a questionnaire over some Chinese students as well as some Thai students who are studying in China. By statistical analysis of the data, it is found that Thai students are quite different from the native Chinese speakers in using Chinese greeting terms. For example, they adopt improper pragmatic strategy and commit errors in social and linguistic pragmatics.It is concluded that there are both subjective and objective factors behind Thai students'pragmatic misuses. 1). Teaching materials are not organized well enough. Some materials analyze and annotate the greeting terms in a way that the key points are not sufficiently emphasized and the dialogues in them are not presented in complete structure, and 2). The cultural and pragmatic teaching of greeting terms is far from flawless. To solve the problems, the author makes the following suggestion: The teacher should pay enough attention to enhancing the students metapragmatic competence during the teaching.