Contrastive Pragmatic Study Of Politeness In English And Chinese-A Cross-cultural Perspective

Politeness is a universal phenomenon, for it can be observed in all languages and cultures. It plays an important role in human communication: it helps establish, maintain or consolidate harmonious interpersonal relationships and facilitate social interactions. Politeness as an observable phenomenon is something superficial and a reflection of specific cultural values in the language. Thus, while admitting the universality of politeness, we must realize the cultural characteristics of politeness. That is, due to the influence of cultural value orientations, the actual manifestations of politeness and the standards for its judgment differ substantially from culture to culture. Exploring politeness, we must consider its cultural specificity and accordingly go into the depth where cultural values are firmly rooted. Only in doing so can we uncover the essence of politeness and successfully account for its cross-cultural differences.In view of such observations, this paper intends to research into English and Chinese politeness from a cross-cultural perspective and explore their cultural differences in the hope to achieve a better understanding of them, to raise our cultural awareness and to promote English-Chinese cross-cultural communication.The thesis, as a whole, consists of four chapters, including the introduction and conclusion.The introduction deals with the definition of politeness, the importance of the study and the structure of the paper.Chapter One reviews the studies of politeness by the Western and Chinese scholars, which serves as the theoretical framework for the whole thesis. It introduces the main ideas of three important theories of politeness, namely, Leech's Politeness Principle, Brown and Levinson's Face Theory, and Gu Yueguo's Chinese politeness principle.Chapter Two is devoted to examine the close link between politenessphenomena and cultural values. While making a contrast of the value orientations of English and Chinese cultures, the writer claims that features of English and Chinese politeness are essentially different from each other, that is, English politeness is basically characterized by "self-valuing and other-respecting" while Chinese politeness is fundamentally characterized by "self-denigrating and other-respecting".Chapter Three, based on the cross-cultural theoretical analyses of English and Chinese politeness in Chapter Two, discusses the issue in the actual communication context. Investigating the use of request strategies in English and Chinese daily interactions, the writer contends that native speakers of English prefer "structural indirectness" to realize their requests, while the Chinese prefer "pragmatic indirectness" to perform their requests. Moreover, it analyzes some instances of pragmatic failure due to the improper use of politeness in cross-cultural communication.Chapter Four presents some implications of this study for cross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching and learning.Finally, the paper comes to the conclusion that the major difference concerning English and Chinese politeness is a matter of orientation rather than degree-more negative politeness orientation in English culture and more positive politeness orientation in Chinese culture.