Abstract

Greeting is a language communicative behavior for human beings to show attention to each other, or to present a type of relationship or social status between individuals or groups of people. Since China is totally different from the Western countries both in the aspect of history and culture, it is undoubtedly that greeting, which is closely related to the cross-cultural communication, may easily lead to misunderstanding. On account of this, it is very important to learn the similarities and differences between English and Chinese greetings in order to facilitate the communications with different people from different cultural backgrounds and understand each other easily.
The author divides the thesis into four parts. Firstly, it introduces some fundamental information of greeting’s development and its classification. Secondly, it, with examples of greetings, introduces some relevant theories, such as Politeness Principle, Face Theory, and Gu Yueguo’s Theory. Thirdly, it focuses on the contrastive analysis of similarities in using, as well as differences in contents, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. In the end, it indicates the significance of study on cultural similarities and differences between English and Chinese greetings. Nowadays, the cross-cultural communication is becoming more and more popular, correctly understanding greetings in different cultures is extremely crucial. Therefore, it is helpful to deal with problems of misunderstanding in cross-cultural communications caused by misusing of greetings.

Key words: greeting; cultural similarities and differences; cross-cultural communication

摘  要

问候语是一种人与人之间表示关心，或者表示某种社会关系的语言交际行为。中国的历史背景和文化背景与西方国家有着极大的差异，因此，在两种不同文化中的问候语的使用也存在巨大差异，而这种差异在跨文化交际中很容易引起误解。鉴于此，本论文致力于探讨中西文化中问候语的文化异同，旨在让不同语言和文化背景下的人们能够相互间无误解地，更深层次地理解和交流。
本文作者将论文分为以下四个部分：第一部分介绍问候语的基本信息，例如它的发展和分类；第二部分结合问候语实例介绍相关理论知识，如礼貌原则，面子理论，顾曰国的礼貌原则等等；第三部分结合实例分析并总结英汉问候语在使用上的相似之处，以及在内容、语义、句法、语用等方面的不同；第四部分指出研究该课题对跨文化交际的意义。随着跨文化交流越来越普遍，了解不同文化中不同的问候语就显得十分重要。因此，本文对解决因误用问候语而导致的跨文化交际的误解有一定的帮助。

关键词：问候语； 文化异同；跨文化交流