A Contrastive Study On Greetings Between Chinese And English

Greetings provide the means for establishing, maintaining and negotiating social relationships. They are also linguistic routines that form part of the repertoire of politeness. By limited words exchanged, the role, status, and intimacy between the two parts can be reflected clearly and confirmed. As the initial channel of speech communication, whether greetings can be used properly hence has a direct effect on a successful social process.Sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology and others have looked at different aspects of greetings. Based on Brown & Levinson's face theory and Leech's six polite principles, scholars in the world can study greetings more deeply. In China, Hu Mingyang presented a contrastive study of greetings and partings between Chinese and English in 1987; Qian Housheng made a systematic exploration of differences and similarities between the two languages from a linguistic and practical angle. He also pointed out that politeness principles were universal to all kinds of cultures but it shared different characteristics in specific culture. However, deficiencies still occur in studies of greetings in China. The role of Non-verbal communication in greeting, for instance, is seldom touched upon. Therefore, it makes practical sense for the author to make a contrastive study of greetings between English and Chinese, with a view to minimize and/or avoid pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication and achieve a more effective exchange among people with different cultural background.This paper is theoretically founded on the face theory of Brown &Levinson (1978), Leech's and Gu Yueguo's politeness principles with a abundant collection of language materials. Through a painstaking analysis, it firstly sums up the common features of greetings in terms of its definition, classification and social functions, followed after a review of former studies. The thesis then focuses on a contrastive exploration on sentence structures, content, lexis and nonverbal communication in English and Chinese. It also tries to make a pilot summing-up about factors causing these differences. Finally, on results of questionnaires, problems of greeting uses in college students will be analyzed, and the thesis also proposes suggestions on college teaching and cross-cultural communication.The study shows that, on the whole, there exist significant differences between English and Chinese greetings. Major findings include:Firstly, differences in the content or overt messages conveyed by routine expressions in English and Chinese greeting processes suggest that what counts as polite in one language may not do so in another.Secondly, Chinese has evolved a much more complex system of address terms in kinship than English, for example, terms of address used as independent greetings are perceived as more polite in Chinese than in English.Thirdly, greetings in the form of affirmation (你好, for example) become increasingly popular in China.Fourthly, significance of nonverbal communication in greeting cannot be neglected in English and Chinese, and there are also many differences between the two.Fifthly, pragmatic failures in the use of English greetings are mainly reflected in degree of politeness, content and terms of address. Mistakes in politeness degree take up the highest percentage of the rate of pragmatic failure.