摘要

问候语是日常生活中频繁使用的言语行为之一。问候不只是一种交流形式，更是一种传递温暖的行为。问候语的功能表现为人际的，即协调社会生活中的人际关系，建立、增进和巩固社会成员之间的关系。中西方问候语因历史背景、文化渊源、社会习俗以及价值观等的不同会呈现出不同的表现形式, 这些不同导致英语学习者在同英语国家的国际友人进行交流时时常会发生文化冲突。本文将在关联理论的指导下，对中西方问候语进行对比分析，阐述中西方问候语的差异，并总结出导致其不同的主要因素，最后总结出一些在跨文化交际中使用问候语时所需要注意的相关事项，从而促进中英文化交流和语言交际。

关键词：问候语；差异；关联理论；跨文化交际

Abstract

Greeting is a verbal behavior which we used frequently in our daily life. Greeting is not only an aspect of communication, but also a behavior to express our inner warmth to others. Greetings’ interpersonal function are mainly embodied in establish, improve and strengthen the relationship with others. Due to the difference of history background, culture origin, social custom and other factors of, greetings will be quite different in different countries, especially in China and western countries. And those differences will bring some unnecessary conflicts and misunderstandings happen during the intercultural communication. The present thesis will analysis the differences of greetings between Chinese and English in the light of relevance theory tentatively. The differences and the factors result in the differences will be presented in this thesis, and some related suggestions will be listed at the end of this thesis in order to promote the cultural communication and language communication between Chinese and English.

Key words: greeting; differences; relevance theory; inter-cultural communication
 
1. Introduction 
1.1 Background
A greeting is something friendly that you say or do when you meet someone. In people’s daily life, greetings are frequently used as a social communicative tool. As Brown and Levinson claim, greetings occur in all languages. Although greetings seem so simple in their function, they are actually very complex. As Laver points out:
Linguistic routines of greeting and parting, far from being relatively meaning and mechanical social behavior, can thus be understood as extremely important strategies for the negotiation and control of social identity and social relationships between participants in conversation. Greetings provide the means for opening conversations appropriately, and for establishing, maintaining and negotiating social relationships. They are also linguistic routines that form part of the repertoire of politeness.