Confucianism & Politeness In Chinese Language

The Chinese language embraces many unique politeness features, such as self-denigration and affirmative propensity. The mainstream western linguistics tends to discover a universal rule of politeness from language-based perspective. Languages, however, bear more or less influences of native culture. Thus, it is necessary to place our understanding of politeness in Chinese in a backdrop of the essence of oriental culture—Confucianism.This paper begins with the exploration of western classic linguistic thoughts, indicating the evolution of politeness theories. With the understanding of"li"and"the golden mean"of Confucius, we dig into the entries of his canonical Analects related to communication from a pragmatic vision. In the meantime, Chinese politeness phenomena are discussed in comparison with English examples in case studies. We believe that a better knowledge of Politeness in Chinese requires the analysis of deeply-rooted cultural phenomena in a broader context.