A Comparative Study Of Chinese And American Verbal Communication Styles From Perspective Of High And Low-context Culture

Culture is always related to communication.Chinese culture is typical of Eastern culture while the American culture is the representative of Western culture.There exist so many differences between these two cultures,thus embarrassment,misunderstanding and conflict happen more frequently in cross cultural communication.Hall proposed the concept of high-context and low-context culture communication,pointing out that culture can be divided into two in terms of context,the high-context and the low-context culture.People rely on the different context to some degree while communicating,which results in the changes of the word meanings.Chinese culture is seen as the high-context culture while American culture is regarded as the low-context one.This cultural mode provides a good dimension for people to study cross-cultural communication.Due to economic globalization,cooperation between countries is becoming more frequent.China and America are the largest trading partners,expanding wide cooperation in economy.Advertisement is seen as an economic activity and important means of mass media,providing audiences with information about products in some way and transmitting certain cultural values consciously or unconsciously.Advertisement can also reflect different communication patterns.Thus,the thesis tries to study the characteristics of Chinese and American communication styles in the context of advertisement based on the theory of high and low-context culture communication.Commercial advertisements are regarded as research samples,providing theoretical reference for people to achieve successful cross-cultural communication in economic activities.The advertisements in the study are selected from China's and America's authority advertisements,Yearbook of China's advertising and American Adverting Age and so forth.There are totally 300 advertisements published after 2010 to guarantee the reliability.The themes of them are closely related to daily life,such as clothes,food,drinks,household appliances,cosmetics,cars and watches and so on.Through analyzing the ways of presenting the brands,types,property,quality and function of the products,author to concludes that there exists one similarity and four differences in communication styles between Chinese and American advertising,including directness;implicitness versus explicitness;elaboration versus succinctness;collectivism versus individualism;and self-effacement versus self-enhancement.The thesis mainly adopts qualitative research methodology and it is illustrated by examples.The thesis probes into the reasons for the differences of communication styles from the following aspects,social and historical roots,cultural value systems,thinking patterns and language habits.The study shows that there are some extinct differences between Chinese and American communication styles.And provides some suggestions for the further study of high and low context culture and their characteristics of communication styles.