A Comparative Study On The Verbal Communication Style Between Chinese And Americans From The Perspective Of High/Low-Context Culture

More and more countries are strengthening their cooperation at levels of politics,economics and cultures,and people with distinguished cultural backgrounds cannot avoid collision and conflict.If being not dealt with properly,these conflicts would greatly influence communication and cooperation.Thus,a good command of cross-culture knowledge is significant.The author does her research at the macro level,that is,from the perspective of geography,social culture and mental state to analyze verbal communication style from the perspective of HC/LC culture.According to the extent of environment on which culture depends,culture can be divided into high-context and low-context culture.This thesis respectively chooses Chinese culture context and American culture context as representative,and collects relative materials as much as possible and makes the research on this point in details.Firstly,the author analyzes people's different communicative values from the perspective of one-to-whole and one-to-one,which are expressed in HC/LC culture context especially inChinese and American culture.Then the author analyzes different verbal communication styles between Chinese and Americans.The materials for analyzing in this part mainly comes from The Joy Luck Club.To make their differences clear-cut,the author draws a table to compare them.Besides analyzing the differences of verbal communication styles in HC/LC culture,the author also explores the deep causes of these differences.From culture context perspective,the author also explores the physical culture context including the adaption to terrain and climate.Then the author analyzes social culture context including the adaption to population,business mode,social-political mode and religious mode.In the end,the author analyzes mental culture context including the adaption to thinking patterns,aesthetic preference and communicative purpose.For linguistic contexts,the author analyzes the text coherence of Chinese and English.Distinguished coherence methods come from different thinking patterns.We have many language choices including choices of different words and different ways of expression.Water containers have kinds of shapes which are similar to the state that different countries have different kinds of contexts.Those contexts are formed by different geographies,social conventions,regulations beliefs,thinking patterns and values.If we pour water into different containers,water will have different shapes.And the influence of context on verbal communication style is similar to the impact of container on water.Different features of context make distinguished verbal communication styles.In the end,the author gives two tips for cross-culture communication.Firstly,communication with HC/LC backgrounds should both try to adapt to each other's verbal communication styles,especially for communicators under high context culture,they should adapt to the verbal communication styles of people under low context culture.So,when people in high context culture communicate with people in low context culture,they should speak directly and assertively to avoid guessing and misunderstanding.Secondly,language learners should not merely master linguistic knowledge,but also improve their intercultural competence including the culture sensitivity.The cultural sensitivity of language learners should be developed by watching films related to language countries,listening to related lectures and taking part in relevant cultural knowledge contests.Inevitably,this thesis has its limitations:firstly,the author analyzes dominant culture.Those changes and exceptions are ignored to have a systematic and general conclusion.Secondly,the author only analyzes the adaption of verbal communication style to contexts,leaving the adaption of contexts to verbal communication style aside.Thirdly,for the limitation of collecting materials,the author only takes Chinese and American culture as respective typical country culture.Since that every country has its unique verbal communication style and context,author's research is somewhat one-side.Perhaps others can collect kinds of materials to do their related research,thus to generate a more precise,general and convincing result.