The Contrastive Analyses Of Time Perceptions In The Chinese And American Cultures

With the acceleration of globalization, all countries enlarge and deepen the communication and cooperation in many aspects, like politics, economics, culture, military, and so forth. Among those interactions, China and the United States have more cross-cultural communications as well as cultural conflicts. As an essential element in a communication, time transmits the non-verbal messages with some particular communicative functions, hence people's different views of time—their perceptions of time has naturally turned out to be one of essential causes of cultural conflicts. It is well known that culture is all-inclusive and ubiquitous and different cultures shaped different perceptions of time.Chinese and American cultures belong to the eastern and western cultures respectively, thus they differ in a good number of aspects, like the philological view, the religious belief, social practice, historical development, which give rise to the great differences in the time perceptions. Correspondingly in practice, those differences exert a great influence on the use of time in both cultures, which also bring down the cross-cultural communication's effectiveness to some degree. Thus, the research on the differences of time perceptions in the Chinese and American cultures does have some social prospect and practical significance.This first discusses the theory of time perception. It breaks through the tradition of merely concentrating on the definition of time, based on Mc Taggart's time theory this thesis put forward two time patterns—the observational time and the experienced time. And then it attempts to find the answers to the following three questions by means of contrastive analyses:(1) Contrasts on Time Perceptions in the Chinese and American Cultures, manifested in language idioms, time measurement, psychological state, TV shows and movies and appointment making, etc.(2) Contrasts on Cultural Roots of Time Perceptions in the Two Cultures, including philosophy, religion, history, social practice, etc.(3) Contrasts on the Influence of Time Perceptions on Use of Time in the Two Cultures, involving time sequence, time accuracy, time length, and time flexibility.Last but not least, a series of concrete measures are listed as to how to bring down cultural conflicts caused by the differences of time perceptions across cultures, in the hope of helping people reach a deeper understanding of the time perceptions in the two cultures, making good use of time in practice, and further improve the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication.