Politeness Strategies In English And Chinese:the Socio-cultural Perspective

Politeness phenomena are everywhere in all human societies, and they are involved in all human interactions. But different societies have different cultures, and different cultures have different beliefs, values, attitudes, points of view, habits and customs, therefore their criteria for judgement of politeness and their linguistic means of the realizations of politeness strategies are not the same, that is, politeness is culture-specific. Because of the cultural diversity, politeness phenomena ought to be paid special attention to in cross-cultural communication. If an interlocutor's face is damaged by the other one's improper strategies, there would be a breakdown in communication. So it is imperative to make a contrastive study of politeness strategies in English and Chinese. Brown and Levinson (1987) compared English and two Indian dialects (i.e. Tzeltal and Tamil) in their Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, and Maria Sifianou (1992) contrastively analyzes the differences of politeness phenomena in English and Greek in her Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-cultural Perspective. This dissertation makes a contrastive study of politeness strategies in English and Chinese cultures, under the guidance of Goffman's concept of face, Brown and Levinson's face theory, Leech's politeness principle and some other scholars? achievements. This paper consists of six chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction, which puts emphasis on the cause of the contrastive study of politeness strategies in English and Chinese and outlines the structure of this thesis. Chapter two defines the concept of politeness, explaining the relations between language, culture and politeness. Chapter three touches on the comprehensive survey of the studies of politeness phenomena by some scholars, focusing on Leech's politeness principle, Brown and Levinson's face theory in which the concept of face, FTAs, negative-face and positive- face wants are discussed. And in this chapter, it has also been pointed out that Brown and Levinson's theory are not completely suitable for Chinese culture, for what Brown and Levinson have generalized is based on English culture and may be brought into general use in English societies instead of Chinese society. In Chapter four, politeness strategies are supplied to deal with those FTAs that were discussed in the previous chapter. Chapter five provides us with case studies, contrastively studying in detail the different realizations of politeness strategies in English and Chinese cultures. From this chapter we can find out the problems existing in communication and the ways on how to solve them. In Chapter six, the pedagogical implications are discussed, paying special attention to students?development of communicative competence and the enhancement of cross- cultural awareness. And the conclusion is drawn in the end.