The most creative and energetic culture always favor the contact point of different cultures。 So, cultural exchanges, integration and interaction among the force of the cultural development are reckoned with each other。 When globalization is constantly identified for a given premise, it will not bring a single culture open or extinct, but the integration of culture。 To construct cross-cultural knowledge space and cultural development, the cultural conflicts and differences are put to the fore, which is the urgent subject under the new situation。 In the growing contact on culture, more and more communication occurs among a variety of culture。 In the exchange of Chinese and American, language and some habits are gradually integrated into the others’ life, and the concept of time will also change。 In this way, a process of culture integration is going, with more exchanges between China and America。

Through the discussion, the author hopes to avoid some misunderstandings and conflicts in cross-cultural activities, improve the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication, promote the process of cultural integration。

2。 Literature Review

Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars。 Nevertheless, perse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems。论文网

Cultural anthropologists define culture as something that everyone has and uses。 Samovar and Porter list some of the representative definitions。 For example, they see culture in nearly all human activities, and define culture as an “integrated system of learned behavior patterns which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not the result of biological inheritance”(Samovar and Porter 46)。 Culture is man’s medium; there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture (Hall Beyond 16)。 How people express themselves, the way they think, how they move, how problems are solved, how their cities are planned and laid out, how transportation systems function and are organized, as well as how economic and government systems are put together and function。

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future。 Time is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience。 Time is often referred to as the fourth dimension, along with the three spatial dimensions。

Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as “what a clock reads”。 Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and International System of Quantities。 For an operational definition of time, one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event constitutes one standard unite such as the second, which is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life。 The operational definition leaves aside the question whether there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned。 Furthermore, there is a subjective component to time, but whether time itself is “felt” as a sensation or a judgment, is a matter of debate。

Anthropologist Hall put forward the function of time orientation in communication for the first time in The Silent Language。 In this book, Hall has made the thorough discussion concerning the time concept in human communication, and he supposed that people with different cultural backgrounds perceive, behave and respond differently in time。 He pointed out time as mono-chronic time concept and poly-chronic time concept。 Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck pointed out time as past orientation and future orientation by how a culture perceives and makes use of time。 Furthermore, some Chinese scholars classified time into circular perception and linear perception, in order to make the difference of Chinese and American culture more explicit。