Differences Between Sino-american Cultural Values From Intercultural Communication Perspective

Intercultural communication is a relatively new discipline, which is a branch study of sociolinguistics and originates in America. As one of the highlights in sociolinguistics, intercultural communication focuses on all forms of communication between members of racial, ethnic or other cultural groups. Linguistic investigations of cultural differences may date back to the early years of the 20th century.With the globalization, intercultural communication has become inevitable experience for Chinese people who are embracing people all over the world in her strive for modernization and internationalization. Cultural differences have become great obstacles to intercultural communication. Shared perceptions lead to actions that are regarded as appropriate and effective behaviors within a culture. The core of these shared perceptions is cultural value, existing only in the minds of people, which provides a norm of behaving, thinking, recognizing, socializing, deducing, evaluating, and make people orient themselves to it. Cultural value refers to the way people live, the norm people behave, the ideal people want to achieve. On the basis of the framework of value orientations by Kluckhohn and Stodtbeck, this dissertation attempts to make a contrastive analysis of differences of Sino-American cultural values, provide insights into the virtues bases of Sino-American cultural values, i.e. Chinese five cardinal virtues and Western four cardinal virtues, explore the influences of cardinal virtues on value dimensions by Hofstede, propose implications to intercultural communication in order to overcome potential barriers caused by cultural differences. As a qualitative study, this dissertation adopts the methods of consulting relative materials and makes a comparative analysis in order to promote mutual understanding between Chinese and Americans.