| There is no doubt that politeness is a prevalent concept in human interaction. It can be expressed verbally and non-verbally, but in this study, only linguistic politeness is discussed; that is, the ways people express politeness verbally through their use of language. As regards its definition, it is often considered socioculturally appropriate behavior and is characterized as a matter of abiding by the expectations of society. This paper aims at examining cross-cultural politeness behavior by comparing western and Chinese conception of face and politeness through evidence from compliment response behavior studies. Compliment responses, as a commonly-occurring politeness behavior, is worthy of study because they are ubiquitous, yet frequently problematic speech acts. It mainly includes 5 parts.The first part is the introduction. The introduction mainly discusses the politeness universality &cultural specificity and compliment response behavior from the perspective of cross-culture, in order to explore the possibility of whether Brown and Levinson's politeness framework can explain the cultural specificity. The second part presents the theoretical framework of face and politeness.Many theories of politeness have been proposed by various pragmaticists. Among them, Goffman's face theory and Brown & Levinson's politeness theory are most important. According to Goffman, face is "positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact". Face, in a sense, is one's situated identity. A person's negative face is the need to be independent, to have freedom of action, and not to be imposed on by others. His positive face is the need to be accepted, even liked, by others, to be treated as a member of the same group, and to know that his or her wants are shared by others. In simple terms, positive face is the need to be connected. If a speaker says something that represents a threat to another individual's expectations regarding self-image, it is described as a face threatening act. Doing face work means performing the action that appears to signal two points of views: a defensive orientation toward saving their own face and a protective orientation toward saving others' face. Brown and Levinson's framework mainly covers three aspects. First, they classify different face threatening acts according to whether they cost the listener's negative face, the listener's positive face, the speaker's negative face or the speaker's positive face. Second, they depict five types of politeness strategies (negative and positive strategies are most important) which function to reduce the imposition or threat to an addressee's face upon the enactment of an inherently face-threatening act (e.g. a command, an interruption). Negative strategies are characterized as expressions of restraint, formality, and distancing, whereas positive strategies are described as expressions of solidarity, intimacy, informality, and familiarity. These strategies parallel an individual's two face wants: to be unimpeded (negative face) and to be approved of (positive face). Third, to determine the level of politeness that the speaker employs to the hearer in doing an FTA, Brown and Levinson further argue that in many (and perhaps all) cultures, there are three indispensable sociological variables involved in the assessment of the seriousness of an FTA: (a) the 'social distance' between the speaker and the hearer;(b) the relative 'power' of the hearer over the speaker; (c) the absolute ranking of impositions in a given culture.The third part approaches politeness from a cross-cultural perspective.The issue of universality versus culture-specificity has been of great interest to pragmaticists. Brown and Levinson's framework represents a universal theory of politeness, proposing that although the content of face may differ in different cultures and societies as regards the exact limit to personal territories, both the interactants' mutual knowl...
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