A Study Of Comparison On Politeness Language Between Chinese And Americans From The Perspective Of High-context And Low-context Communication

With the development of globalization and world integration, the communication and cooperation among countries in lots of fields tend to enlarge. In the background of cross-cultural communication, successful cross-cultural understanding is based on recognizing the similarities and differences between two countries. It’s indispensable to use politeness language in interpersonal communications. Politeness language can be found in all kinds of languages and it helps people establish interpersonal relationships and keeps the smooth communication through greetings, responses to compliments, thanks-expressing, apologizing, and partings. Politeness exists in all countries, it is an important tool to establish social harmonies and aid successful communication. As an essential part of culture and communication, politeness language enjoys great popularity from scholars and experts who are in different countries and fields. This thesis is a comparative study of politeness language between Chinese and Americans from perspective of high-context and low-context communication. Edward. T. Hall(1976), an American anthropologist, proposes and distinguishes the concept of high-context and low-context communication. He pointed out that China is one of the typical representative of high-context communication countries, while America is one of low-context communication countries. Therefore, when people from the two countries communicate with each other, the differences come into being.Based on Hall’s high-context and low-context communication cultures, this thesis analyzes the differences of politeness language which is also the research object such as greetings, compliments and the responses, thanks-expressing, apologizing and partings between Chinese and Americans through qualitative analysis and study of induction and comparison. The results suggest that apparent differences of the usage of politeness language between two countries exist in terms of the following aspects: information internalized and information plainly coded, reactions reserved and exterior reactions,covert or allusive and overt or explicit, stable and unstable interpersonal links, which is greatly influenced by high-context and low-context communication cultures respectively Finally, this thesis reveals that different geographies, religions and ideology, as well as social system result in the Chinese high-context communication culture and American low-context communication culture.Understanding the differences of politeness language between Chinese and Americans is conducive to avoiding unnecessary miscomprehension, which helps to achieve a successful communication and promote intercultural communication competence.