A Study Of Politeness Under The Framework Of Relevance Theory

Politeness, viewed as the major social constraints on social interaction, has been one of the most important and productive areas of research in pragmatics. There has been a common viewpoint that politeness theories and cognitive pragmatics did not seem to have had an affinity with each other. So, ever since Relevance Theory was outlined, there have been heat discussions about its social dimensions, i.e. whether it can be adopted to explain linguistic phenomena such as politeness phenomena. In the present thesis, a descriptive study of politeness phenomena will be made under the framework of Relevance Theory. In this thesis, utterances are analyzed under the framework of Relevance Theory to prove that Relevance Theory is able to provide an alternative approach to explaining politeness. It can also solve the problems that traditional approaches to politeness are usually confronted with while interpreting politeness phenomena in some non-English cultures (specifically Chinese culture in this thesis). The author mainly discusses: 1) understanding politeness through recognizing the speaker's intention of being polite; 2) conveying politeness through arousing the hearer's awareness of the intention of politeness; 3) study of non-English politeness under the framework of Relevance Theory. Based on the analysis, this thesis proposes some strategies of being polite on the basis of Relevance Theory in the hope to guide appropriate verbal behaviors.