A Contrastive Study Of Ordinary Language Between Chinese And American From The Perspective Of Cultural Dimensions Theory

The progress of transportation technology and economy have made the increasingly frequent exchanges between China and the United States in the past decades,which has built up the situations of interaction and interdependence.The emergence of close communication not only takes great economic benefits to both sides,but also generates cultural conflicts inevitably.Meanwhile,cultural differences are not only showed in differences in the Sino-America behaviors,communications between languages can also influence different cultural connections.Guided by distinctive social values,the expressions of languages have various patterns.Ordinary language which reflects differences in social group roughly has stronger connections with life comparing with public languages.Moreover,some excellent cross-cultural literary works as carriers record daily routines of people,and provide some good textures for us to explore cultural differences in ordinary expressions.Everything I Never Told You is the debut work of a Chinese-American writer named Celeste Ng,and it gets a great deal of concern from readers after publication.In 2014,the novel tops Amazon's Best Book of the Year List.Based on Celeste Ng own personal experience of being an ethnic Chinese,she spent six years creating this crosscultural novel to depict cultural conflicts in a cross-ethic family.The background of the novel sets in a small town of Ohio located in America and basically tells a tragic story happened in a Chinese mixed-race family.Everything I Never Told You profoundly discusses ordinary problems about racial issues in modern society,besides,it has indepth descriptions of cultural differences under a model family in America.Celeste Ng adopts plenty of psychological descriptions to highlight cultural differences,the ordinary language in the novel has distinctive features as well.In accordance with current studies,many scholars focus on the analysis of characters from the perspective of research method in literature,however,ordinary language in this novel doesn't get much attention.Cultural dimensions theory was put forward by Geert Hofstede in the Netherlands,and the theory is often applied to analyze cultural differences.At the early stage of the theory,Hofstede divided his theory into five dimensions: individualism,power distance,uncertainty avoidance,masculinity,and long-term orientation.In order to perfect theory,he added a new dimension called indulgence to distinguish attitudes toward life among different groups of people in 2010.After that,the six dimensions of theory as a specific theoretical framework helps scholars to understand cultural differences insightfully in various cultural backgrounds and make intercultural communication go smoothly.Taking the cultural dimensions theory as the theoretical framework,this thesis intends to take some typical ordinary language in the novel as examples to analyze cultural conflicts in values.The thesis tries to solve problem as follows:(1)what are the culture differences between the ordinary language in Chinese and American in Everything I Never Told You?(2)What are the reasons for the differences in ordinary language in Everything I Never Told You?(3)What methods for people in different cultural backgrounds can be offered to promote communication smoothly?This paper draws a conclusion that the differences in Chinese culture and the American culture lead to the diversities in language expressions.And on this basis,the thesis points out that for achieving the goal of successful intercultural communication,people who are in different culture should respect other cultures,avoid stereotypes and improve cultural adaptability during the procedure of cultural exchanges.Meanwhile,appropriate communicative behaviors and standing in the stance of other cultures to consider cultural issues are the methods to deal with cultural conflicts effectively.This study helps to comprehend the language expressions and cultural connotations of the other country from the perspective cross-culture.However,this paper has limitations that it is the exploration of ordinary language in one novel.The author sincerely hopes that it can provide some useful implications for promoting harmonious intercultural communication.In addition,the author expects more scholars to think deeply about cultural differences in the future.