Modern Chinese Greeting Research

The greeting is the universal behavior that people in every country and every nation make; therefore, it becomes one of the most frequently used speech forms in daily life. As the starting sign of the interpersonal communication activities, the improper use of greeting will lead to the barrier of emotion or the failure of communication. This article first gives the definition of the greeting and then analyses the principles of communicational strategies involved in it. The greeting can be classified from the semantic perspective into the following six types: the type of using terms of address; the type of using greeting terms; the type of asking; improvising; ridicule type and compounding. The characteristics stemmed from it are sporadic, relevance, simplicity and diversity. The use of greeting is not unlimited; on the contrary, it is subjected to many pragmatic factors. This article analyses the factors that affect the usage of greeting from three aspects as situational context factors, cultural factors and social factors.Modern Chinese greeting provides a variety of performance space for the verbal communication activities. When we choose an appropriate word to greet in verbal communication activities in order to completing the exchange of feelings of the communicative process, it is not only the emotional communication of the greeting should be taken into consideration but also the pragmatic constraints of modern greeting.