Politeness Principle And The Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failure

The notion of politeness conveys different moral and normative values. In the Chinese context, the connotation of politeness displays the typical Chinese characters. Accordingly, Gu Yueguo demonstrates five maxims (the self denigration maxim, the address term maxim, the refinement maxim, the agreement maxim, the virtues-words-deeds maxim) as the Chinese Politeness Principle, which are different as Leech maxims in 1983. Therefore, PP, endowing with the color of culture, causes the pragmatic failures for the speaker's unawareness of the difference in the actual ways to realize politeness.A questionnaire was designed to the two types of students separately in Beijing Language and Culture University to check what kind of speech acts is considered as politeness in the specific cultures.The investigation shows that different and more specific angles of PP pragmatic failure can be analyzed besides Thomas' division of the pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure.From the lexical point of view, the PP pragmatic failure occurs due to the lexical vacancy between the two cultures. In the PP, the lexical vacancy is presented distinguishingly in the different addressing form of the two different cultures.From the psychological point of view, it is demonstrated that in interpreting grammatical ambiguity there is almost always 'bias' ( by which they mean that one meaning is usually seen first by most people). This is equally true in processing pragmatic ambiguity. It can be shown that native speakers fairly predictable assign certain pragmatic force to certain utterances. Further more, some fixed speech act strategies in the first language would inappropriately transfer from the first language into the second language.More subdivision of the pragmatic failure should be added to the pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure.There are different degrees of the directness of the English and the Chinese. When the speakers of Chinese want to show their concern or give some useful suggestions, they would prefer to use more direct utterances than the native speaker, hence, the pragmalinguistic failure came forth. The inappropriate use of other English forms and the lack/over use of some words may also cause the pragmalinguistic failure.As for the sociopragmatic failure, it stems from cross-culturally different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behavior. Actually, it concerns free/non-free topics and the cross-culturally different manners of appropriate linguistic behavior. Nonverbal signals compose partof contextual background, so they can not be neglected either.Therefore, the ELT in China requests the teacher to foster more pragmatic competence, i.e. the cross-cultural pragmatic use of the sentences in social background than the linguistic competence, i.e. how to utter a sentence grammatically and structurally correct in their students. As for the teacher, the teaching of language is beyond the realms of mere training and truly educational. As for the subjective condition, some methods should be used to elevate the students' pragmatic competence, especially in different cultures.