The study of Greetings in Chinese and English英语毕业论文1.doc

Table of ContentsAbstract.1I. Introduction.2II. The importance of greetings in the following three aspects.21. The first aspect: greetings in everyday life .32. The second aspect: greetings in social cultural community. 33. The third aspect: greetings in cross-cultural communications.3III. Chinese and English greetings on different occasions.31. Greetings classified according to time.31.1 All-time greetings.31.2 Real-time greetings.31.3 Seasonal greetings.41.4 Ceremonial greetings .42. Greetings classified according to formality .42.1 Formal greetings .42.2 Informal greetings .4IV. The differences between English greetings and Chinese greetings .41. The types of English greetings .41.1 Short greetings.41.2 extended greetings41.3 time-bound greetings.51.4 Distance-independent greetings .52. The types of Chinese greetings.52.1 Declarative-sentence-pattern greetings52.2 Yes-no-question greetings52.3 Interrogative-sentence-pattern greetings.62.4 Single-phrase greetings6V. Conclusion.7Bibliography.8The study of Greetings in Chinese and EnglishAbstractLanguage is the medium for human communication. Greeting, as a component of language, plays a most important role in the communication. It is one kind of speech act that frequently occurs in everyday life. Therefore, proper greeting behavior is crucial for the foundation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. However, since China is totally different from the Western countries both in its history and its culture, it is undoubtedly that greeting, which is closely related to its culture, will be quite different from that in the Western countries. Therefore, to acknowledge the differences existing in the greeting is the first step to achieve mutual understanding. This article, with some related theories presented, aims at a contrastive study of greetings in English and in China. Some researches are also done with the greeting on its level, its functions and the elements.Key Words: greeting ,English，Chinese，cultural differences，cross-cultural communication摘 要说话是人们进行交流的前言。问候语是说话的一个组成部分，也是社交礼节的主要部分；它是日常生活中频繁使用的言语行为之一，具有成立和维持各类人际关系的作用。然而，由于中国的历史布景和文化布景与西方国家有着相昔时夜的差异，存在于文化之中的问候语也随之有着明显的差异。这种差异在跨文化交际中很轻易引起误解。为促进分歧说话和文化布景下人们的彼此沟通，需要深切体会中西文化中问候语的差异。本文经过过程对中西方文化布景中一些典型问候语的对比研究，阐述了两种文化中关于问候语的相关理论，在条理、功能、根源等方面对问候语进行研究。关键字：问候语 英语 汉语 文化差异 跨文化交际I. IntroductionWith the development of society and culture, communication between people becomes more and more important. When China implemented its reform and opening up policy, especially after China entered WTO, communication with other countries has become more important. However, people in different countries hold different beliefs and values, which result in misunderstanding. In order to avoid the embarrassment, we should know the cross-cultural communication greeting. Greetings are important, because they frequently occur in everyday social interactions all over the world. Greetings are words used to start an everyday communicative interaction or acknowledge of the presence of others. It is such a quick and conventionalized episode of communication that people usually give no thought to what happens during those few seconds of the interaction. Greetings are so important in understanding, and it is the structure and the essence of a society and culture.II. The importance of greetings in the following three aspects.1. The first aspect: greetings in everyday lifeA theoretical study of greeting as an everyday practice can help people to realize that greetings in everyday life are important for the understanding of a culture and society. Although a minor episode of interaction, greeting has an important function in the management of human relations. It is by means of greeting that friends acknowledge, confirm, and strengthen their friendship. While performing greeting rituals, interact signal to each other their respective social status, their degrees of familiarity, and the roles they will play in the coming encounter. A study of greetings contributes much to understanding the structure of the interpersonal relationship in a given social community.2. The second aspect: greetings in social cultural communityThe study of greetings helps to develop a situational approach towards the study of cross-cultural communication. Generally speaking, greeting is a reutilized situational frame transmitted in a given social cultural community. Like many other frames such as apologizing, complimenting, etc., greeting is one of the cultural blocks, which varies cross-culturally. A systematic study of greeting with social cultural factors taken into account will tend to better understand the structure of a certain society and culture.3. The third aspect: greetings in cross-cultural communicationsA contrastive study of greeting can help people to enhance their cross-cultural awareness. With the development of society and culture, especially the development of globalization, cultural clashes will inevitably arise between people with different cultural backgrounds. As a result, an urgent task confronted by people is to enhance people cross-cultural awareness in order to avoid or overcome cultural clashes in cross-cultural communications. Since greetings occur among people all over the world, it become an important part of social behavior .A better understanding of cultural differences in greetings will surely enhance the maintenance of human relations in cross-cultural communications.III. Chinese and English greetings on different occasionsGreeting expressions are abundant in English and Chinese. They can be classified in various ways.1. Greetings classified according to timeGreetings in both languages seem to vary with time: some greetings can be used for any day or at any time of the day whereas others cannot. They can be divided into the following subcategories:1.1 All-time greetingsAll-time greetings are those not contained in usage by the time: they can be used by for any and at any time of day. For example: Hello! /Hi! (你好!) /How are you? (你身体好吗?)1.2 Real-timeReal-time are those used in close relation to the time of the day: each of them can only be used at a specific time of the day accordingly. For example: Good morning! (早上好!)/ Good afternoon! (下午好!)/ Good evening! (晚上好!)1.3 Seasonal greetingsSeasonal greetings are those used only on some special days, such as Christmas, New Years Day. For example: Happy New Year! (新年好!) Merry Christmas! (圣诞节欢愉!) Good luck for everything. (万事如意!)1.4 Ceremonial greetingsCeremonial greetings are those used at birthdays, wedding ceremonies, and other occasions. For example: Happy birthday! (生日欢愉!) Congratulations! (恭喜!)2. Greetings classified according to formalityGreetings vary with speech style. They can be classified according to their formality of usages: 2.1 Formal greetingsFormal greetings are those used on important occasions where maximum attention needs to be paid to speech and where speakers must be very polite. For example: How do you do? 您好！ 2.2 Informal greetingsInformal greetings are those used in conversations to create a relaxed language environment. For example: Hello! 你好！IV. The differences between English greetings and Chinese greetings1. The types of English greetingsIt is estimated that in English there are at lease a dozen different greetings, from “Hi” to more specific and longer ones like “How is everything with you?” People choose the proper one to greet different people they meet on different occasions. English greetings can be divided into four categories:1.1 Short greetingsShort greetings like “Hi” “Hello” “Hey”, are very informal but widely used by westerners. People can exchange “Hi” almost with anyone at anywhere and anytime.1.2 Extended greetingsExtended greetings, unlike short greetings, are more specific and longer. It is often used in formal occasions. For example, when you see your old friend in an important meeting, you may say “How are you getting on?” or “How is everything with you?”1.3 Time-boundTime-bound greetings are no doubt related to time (morning, afternoon, evening, etc.), they are more formal and often used between supervisors and employees, teachers and students, to name just a few. For example, you come to school in the morning and come across your teacher Mr. Smith, you can say “Good morning” or “Good morning, Sir” In this respect, us Chinese use similar greetings such as “Zao shang hao (Good morning)” or “ Lao shi, zao shang hao (Good morning, teacher)” On informal occasions, “Morning” will be enough.1.4 Distance-dependentDistance-dependent greetings are used between strangers who meet for the first time. For example, people greet a new acquaintance with “How do you do” and expect the same answer.2. The types of Chinese greetingsDifferent from westerners, Chinese people pay more attention to etiquettes and status. As a result, Chinese greetings are redundant and hard to be understood by foreigners. In terms of sentence patterns Chinese greetings can be classified into the following types:2.1 Declarative-sentence-pattern greetings Declarative-sentence-pattern greetings are greetings to give a statement to show politeness. For example:早上好。(Good morning.)你好。/ 您好。(How do you do？)2.2 Yes-no-question greetingsYes-no-question greetings are used to state something obvious. For example, when one sees his friend reading, he may ask: “Are you reading?” Foreigners will think this ridiculous because everybody knows that the friend is reading. However, according to Chinese culture, Chinese people like to say something obvious as a form of greeting. Here are some examples:吃饭呢？(Are you having your dinner?)在做作业啊？(Are you doing your homework?)When translating, we cannot translate these Chinese greetings literally, or the foreigners will not be able to understand them. For example, when a Chinese comes into a dining room and sees one of his friend eating, he may say: “Chi fan ne?” According to Leechs politeness principle, we can translate it into “Have a nice meal.”2.3 Interrogative-sentence-pattern greetings待添加的隐藏文字内容2Interrogative-sentence-pattern greetings are used to asking some information. For example, when one sees his classmate reading, he may ask: “What are you reading?” Obviously, if we greet the English native speakers in this way, it will certainly cause misunderstanding, because the western people have a high value on privacy. Here are more examples:去哪呀？(Where are you heading for?)吃过啦？(Have you eaten?)在干什么？（What are you doing?）2.4 Single-phrase greetingsSingle-phrase greetings mean that people use only a phrase or a word to greet other people. For instance:早。(Morning.)张老师。(Teacher Zhang.)Here are the results:English greetings used by Chinese people ExpressionsS/DPARW/HFRIINFSUPSTRGood morning!255010322010098Morning!80508890881154Hello!78102060502177Hi!608209987832Chinese greetings used by Chinese people 招呼语子女父母夫妻朋友下级上级陌生人您早！0600209432早啊！29508780656330早！97618990874530嘿！41033875407From the above results we can conclude that with Chinas opening up policy, more and more Chinese are learning English and they prefer use simple English greetings in their daily life. Besides, people tend to use different greetings to different persons. They talk softly to children, respectively to superiors. Comparatively, Chinese greetings pay much more attention on formality than English greetings.V. ConclusionGreetings, as keys of communication, differ from culture to culture. Westerners use simple words to greet because of their preference of individualism. While Chinese like use various greetings to show their enthusiasm and respectfulness. With the further development of globalization, more Chinese people will learn to greet friends in English, and more westerners will try to get used to Chinese greeting culture. For example, we can hear some English native speakers say sentences like “Long time no see” “You go, I go”. In totall, greetings can a sequence of communication and maintain interpersonal relationship.Therefore, I think the study of English and Chinese greetings has a long way to go. More efforts should be made to close the relationship of these two languages so as to eliminate cross-cultural misunderstanding. Through studying the greetings between two cultures ,we have a deep understanding about two different cultures , and in the future we can develop our relationship better. Bibliography1Gu. Yueguo. Politeness Pragmatics and Culture J. Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Research. 1992. No.4. 2Leech. G. Principles of Pragmatics M. London and New York: Longman. 1983.3Qian. Housheng. Greetings and Partings in English and ChineseA Contrastive Study of Linguistic Routines and Politeness M. Beijing: Commercial Press.1996.汉语文献1高俊梅. “谈英汉招呼语及其意义”J, <<运城学院学报>> .2006.第3期.2曲卫国, 陈流芳. “汉语招呼分析”J, <<华东师范大学学报(哲学社会科学报)>>.2001.第3期.3陈松岑，“汉语招呼语的社会分布和发展趋势”，语文建设