The Contrastive Study Of The Polite-salutation-and-Farewell Verbal Behavior Between Chinese And Italian

This paper presents a contrastive study of the verbal behavior of politesalutation and farewell between Chinese and Italian culture. The paper considersthat as two of the most important verbal behaviors in the interaction, the politesalutation and farewell are both habitus-like verbal behaviors, varied from differentcontexts. It is hard to analyze them with the theories of logical strategies orpragmatic principles, compared with which the theory of Adaptation is moreconvincing. This study was undertaken in the frame of Jef Verschueren’sAdaptation theory, which includes the communicative context and the linguisticcontext. Our study analyzed the polite salutation and farewell verbal behaviors inChinese and Italian under the communicative context. We described them in variedcontext ingredients, to explore how the ingredients vary the options of the words inboth languages. Based on the analysis, we proposed some tactical strategies of thepolite salutation and farewell verbal behavior for cross-cultural interaction.The polite phenomena exists in all human cultures, many studies tried toexplain its mechanism but there is always something that can’t be standardized,because we practice the interactive polite behaviors in real dynamical surroundingswith different people even crossing cultures. So the more practical way to describeour verbal behaviors and to guide people to adapt such a complicated system is todescribe them in different context ingredients, comparing with each other, andadjust the way they behave, to make the crossing-culture interaction effectively andalways in harmony.The paper consists of six chapters, the first of which is the introduction to thewhole study; the second is a description of the different ingredients of thecommunicative context that vary the options of the salutation and farewell verbalbehaviors; the third gives the linguistic structure of the salutation and farewellverbal behaviors in Chinese and Italian; the fourth compares the influences ofdifferent communicative context ingredients to the salutation and farewellbehaviors in Chinese and Italian; the fifth proposes some strategies for the adaptthe behaviors in crossing-culture interactions; the sixth as well as the last, is theconclusion.