A Pragmatic Study Of Greetings From A Cross-cultural Perspective

By"greeting", we mean an episode of action sequences interactants produce at the beginning of face-to-face encounters to acknowledge and recognize the presence of the interactants for the sake of politeness and relationship initiation and maintenance.Greeting is an everyday practice that is routinized and happens at very low levels of awareness in intercultural interactions. It is, on the surface, a spontaneous reaction to the coming together of people. The study of greetings as an everyday practice will help people to realize that everyday life is important for the understanding of a culture and society.The study of greeting as an everyday practice has cross-cultural significance. Today, we Chinese people are increasingly placed upon the position in which the traditional culture can no longer be depended upon to produce reliable readings of what people are going to do next. We are constantly in the position of interacting with cultural strangers. A direct result of this situation is an increasing awareness of intercultural differences which directly influences intercultural communication. The urgent task of intercultural studies of interactions must, however, be based first of all upon comprehensive and systematic descriptions and analyses of one's native interactional models. Since greetings occur among people all over the world, it would appear to be an excellent unit of social behavior to study if one is to begin to examine systematically what is universal and what is traditional in human communication behavior. Although cultural comparison is not the main purpose in this paper, it is hoped that the details provided in this paper will prove useful in cross-cultural studies.This present study consists of six Parts including the introduction. Part II reviews the literature concerning the study of greetings in both China and abroad. Part III serves as the linguistic investigation and it generalizes greetings into routinized and non-routinized and a more detailed analysis of greetings from other aspects. Part IV demonstrates that greeting is basically a behaviour of politeness and summarizes the aspects of norms and principles of politeness for greeting interactions in both English and Chinese and continues to provides a general explanation for the norms, patterns and distribution of greetings with the help of the theories of interpersonal relationship structuring. Part V goes beneath the surface and attempts to explore the cultural differences in value systems and their underlying philosophical sources of the differences between Chinese and English politeness phenomenon. In Chinese culture, Confucianism, especially the Chinese"Ren"and"Li"determines almost all aspects of the Chinese life--- they have become the collective unconsciousness for the Chinese programming their social behavior."Ren"and"Li"actually act as shapers of the patterns of interpersonal relationships which in turn affect interactions and communications on both sides. As a matter of fact,"Ren"and"Li"is a system of moral codes in the Chinese context predisposing a society in which relationship is asymmetrical and reciprocally obligatory. On the contrary, what is emphasized in English culture is individualism and as a result equal or horizontal relationship is highly valued. Thus the value of equality is prevalent in social relationships. The relationships are symmetrical. This symmetry presupposes role equality rather than differentiation as is the case in China. And the last Part summarizes the study and draws some tentative conclusions and implications.