Analysis Of Communication Patterns Of High-Context And Low-Context Culture From The Perspective Of Adaptation-Theory

More and more countries are strengthening their cooperations at levels of politics, economics and cultures, people with distinguished cultural backgrounds cannot avoid collision and conflict. If being not dealt with properly, these conflicts would greatly influence communication and cooperation. Thus, a good command of cross-culture knowledge is significant. According to the extent of environment on which culture depends on, culture can be divided into high-context and low-context culture. This thesis respectively chooses Chinese culture context and American culture context as representative, collects relative materials as much as possible and makes the research on this point in detail.There are scholars who research pure adaptation theory. There are scholars who have great interest in the application of adaptation theory into translation and second language acquisition. There are scholars who research the relationship between culture and communication. However, there are relatively less people who research different communication patterns in different culture contexts from the perspective of adaptation theory. Usually, people study culture context and communication pattern at a micro level, for example, research on communications on different occasions. However, the author does her research at the macro level, that is, from geography, social culture and mental state level to analyze contextual adaptation and communication patterns.Firstly, the author analyzes people's different communicative values on the relationships between one and the whole and one to one; to what extent that speech expresses information in HC/LC culture context especially in Chinese and American culture. Then the author analyzes different communication patterns for Chinese and Americans. To make their differences clear-cut, the author draws a table to compare two.Besides analyzing the differences of communication pattern in HC/LC, from the perspective of adaptation theory, the author also explores the deep reasons that lead to this distinction. From culture context perspective, the author analyzes physical culture context including the adaptation to terrain and climate. Then the author analyzes social culture context including the adaptation to population, business mode, social-political mode and religious mode. In the end, the author analyzes mental culture context including the adaptation to thinking patterns, aesthetic preference and communicative purposes. For linguistic context, author analyzes text coherence of Chinese and English. Distinguished coherence methods come from different thinking patterns.On the relationship among adaptation theory, context and communication patterns, the author believes that the relationship among them is like that of water and container. As it is known, water is liquid, which can freely flow and make different shapes. It is the same with language. We have many language choices including choices of different words and different ways of expression. Water containers have kinds of shapes which are similar to the state that different countries have kinds of contexts. Those contexts are formed by different geographies, social conventions, regulations, beliefs, thinking patterns and values. If we pour water into different containers, water would have different shapes. And the influence of context on communication is similar to the impact of container has on water. Different features of context make distinguished communication modes.In the end, the author gives two tips for cross-culture communicators. Firstly, communicators with HC/LC background should both try to adapt to each other's communication pattern. Especially for high context communicators, they should adapt to low context communication patterns. Secondly, language learners should not merely master linguistic knowledge but also intercultural competence. Inevitably, this thesis has its limitations: firstly, the author analyzes dominant culture. Those changes and exceptions are ignored to have a systematic and general conclusion. Secondly, the author only analyzes the adaptation of communication patterns to context, leaving the adaptation of context to communication patterns aside. Thirdly, for the limitation of collecting materials, author only takes Chinese and American culture as respective typical country culture. Since that every country has his unique communication pattern and context, author's research is somewhat one-sided. Perhaps others can collect kinds of materials to do their related research which would generate a more precise, general and convincing result.