Research On "Silence" In The Cross-cultrual Context Of Sino-US Culture

Silence, which plays a vital role in interpersonal communication, is a non-verbal icon used in communication and it involves various kinds of information at different levels and it is frequently used with spoken language. Silence bears distinctive cultural characteristic, and in different cultures it conveys different implications. And also, different meanings necessitate different use of and attitudes towards silence. With the more frequent cultural exchanges between Chinese and Americans, silence becomes a commonplace in their cross-cultural communication and so if we fail to have a full understanding of the different meanings of silence and their different used-contexts, there might exist difficulties or troubles in the understanding in the cross-cultural communication. Therefore, this paper attempts to exploratively analyze the differences between Chinese and American languages in their cross-cultural communication and also try to find out the reasons contributing to it.The paper takes a quantitative method to analyze, both in a diachronic and bidirectional manner, the silence phenomena in the Sino-US cross-cultural contexts. And the corpus employed is collected from the specific examples of the classic talks or interviews related to Sino-US cross-cultural contexts. Comparing the silence in both contexts and also using the cross-cultural transition theory help people to understand the meanings of silence in different linguistic contexts, thus enhancing people cross-cultural communicative ability.The paper includes five chapters:Chapter one is the introduction and it briefly introduces the motivation and background of the chosen topic, the current research overview, literature review, the analytical methods and its significance.Chapter two generally deals with the definitions of silence: it refers to speechless situation, both consciously or subconsciously, in people's face-to-face conversations. Then this chapter summarizes five different"silences", coupled with their features and functions.Chapter three mainly uses methods of discourse analysis, narratology and iconology, coupled with the texts in The Analects of Confucious and Bible to compare the differences in silence between Chinese and American languages. And then the author uses the power-gap dimension and egoism in the cross-cultural transmission theory to explore the causes for these differences. Chapter four uses the methods of interview to explore and research the silence in Sino-US modern contexts and finds out the great differences in use of silence between Chinese and Americans users. The difference affects the cross-cultural communication between Chinese and Americans. And the research points out that the root causes for the difference lie in: Chinese and American classic talks'influence and evolution on the users, the different Polite Principle's influence and the different contexts'influence.Chapter five summaries the whole paper and also lists the limitations of the study.