Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Analysis Of Politeness And Foreign Language Teaching

Politeness is a universal phenomenon of every group and society. Politeness principle is a civilized approach widely used by different groups and societies. But the implication and maxims that it may cover varies from culture to culture. These differences are formed under the longstanding influence of various factors such as society, history, anthropology and geography. If we fail to realize this point, we will have a lot of difficulty in communicating effectively with the people from different cultural backgrounds.Nowadays with the growth of cross-cultural communication, the earth seems to be getting smaller and smaller. But it doesn't mean that contradictions and problems have become less. With the interconnectedness of people with different backgrounds, cultural differences as well as the misunderstanding and conflicts that they bring about seem to be more apparent. When communicating with foreigners, Chinese are likely to make pragmatic errors if they only stress on vocabularies and sentence structures, ignoring the appropriateness of the utterance. So from the perspective of pragmatics this thesis will explore politeness in terms of different concepts and forms of embodiment in cross-cultural communication. And it will also reflect on some theories proposed by some foreign and Chinese scholars and will discuss the politeness phenomena in some verbal behavior. Finally with the awareness of the current situation of "emphasizing grammar but ignoring the cultural teaching", the writer of this thesis will propose some measures to be taken to improve students' pragmatic competence and strengthen their cross-cultural communication awareness.