A Culture-Specific Study Of Politeness Concept In Chinese And American Contexts

Politeness serves not only as the rapport of various interpersonal relationships, it also helps to establish the harmonious communicative atmosphere. Therefore, politeness has two characteristics: i. Politeness is a vehicle for the maintenance of social equilibrium; ii. Politeness is a form of interpersonal support to avoid confrontation. The study of politeness has a long history. However, it was not until the 1970s that politeness began to be studied systematically in the domain of pragmatics.In the 1970s, American philosopher Grice proposed the co-operative principle (CP) on the basis of the speech acts by two previous American philosophers Austin and Searle. This principle asserts that interaction is supposed to comply with four maxims: maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of manner, and maxim of relevance. However, there are always occasions in which some maxims are purposefully violated. To compensate the weakness, Grice put forward another principle-conversational implicature (CI) to incorporate with CP. Although CI and CP provide forceful explanation to people's speech. However, they cannot give a full explanation to the relationship between sense and force in speech (Leech, 1983). With this inadequacy, other Western linguists began to question Grice's theory by proposing the politeness principle (PP). Hence the research on politeness is dominated by a strategic approach. RXakoff, Brown and Levinson, and Leech et al were among those who contributed more in this area. They claim that their politeness mechanism is cultural universal. However, other scholars such as Blum-Kula, Thomas, Hill et al, Ide et al, Matsumoto and Gu Yueguo began to propose a culture-specific politeness view when they carried out politeness studies within specific cultural contexts. The present study is laid in Gu's theoretical framework of four essential notions about Chinese politeness.The literature review of politeness is done from two perspectives: a universal perspective and culture-specific perspective. Although it has the mutualfunction of maintaining interpersonal rapport, politeness is by nature culture-specific. Politeness concept is interpreted differently within different cultural contexts. Inspired by the experiment carried out by Ide et al in which they studied the different correlation between 'polite' and nine adjectives evaluating human behavior in American English and Japanese, we carried out a replicate study attempting to find the correlation between 'polite' and the nine adjectives in Chinese context. SPSS was used to yield the Chinese correlation coefficients of 'polite'. We then compared these results with those from Ide et al. Through the comparison, we got the following findings: (i) There is a certain degree of similarity on the correlations of 'polite' with the nine adjectives evaluating in Chinese and American English contexts; (ii) American English context manifests a volition-oriented politeness concept while Chinese context shows a discernment-oriented politeness concept, (iii) There is a striking difference on the perception of the correlation between 'polite' and 'appropriate', 'considerate', 'friendly' and 'casual' in Chinese and American contexts..To better prove our culture-specific argument, we also refer to the empirical result about the Japanese concept of politeness. The comparison of politeness concept between Chinese and American as well as Japanese context has proved that the concept of politeness by nature will inevitably fall under different cultural interpretation and evaluation, though on the surface level, it universally serves as the function of social rapport and maintenance of appropriate interpersonal relationship. Thus Chinese survey results empirically prove our argument of the thesis.Based on the findings of the survey, we proposed some suggestions, which are instructive to the language teaching and learning: (i) How should we evaluate the universality and culture-specificity of politeness? What decisions should be made in language teaching to cultivate language l...