A Contrastive Study Of Politeness Principles And Strategies Between English And Chinese

This paper is a contrastive study on politeness principles and politeness strategies between English and Chinese. As a universal phenomenon, the politeness plays a key role in establishing and maintaining social harmony, and prescribing individuals' linguistic behavior. It is not only language-specific, but also cultural-specific. Due to cultural differences, language differs greatly from one another in expressing and understanding politeness. The breakdowns of cross-cultural communication may occur if people from one culture impose their own principles and criteria of politeness formulae on the people from another culture. We are convinced that, with more and more cross-cultural interactions, the discussion of the differences between English and Chinese in the area of politeness realization will definitely be significant for the purpose of increasing interlocutors' cultural awareness and communicative competence.The present thesis is composed of six parts: (1) Chapter One serves as introduction, which presents the definitions of politeness and format of my thesis; Chapter Two is concerned with various theories on politeness from the perspective of the Conversational-maxim; Chapter Three elaborates politeness from Face-management perspective, in which Face Theory proposed by Brown and Levison and Politeness Model put forward by Gu Yueguo are contrasted; Chapter Four presents PolitenessStrategies, that is, how to employ an appropriate politeness strategy in different situations; Chapter Five mainly focuses on Politeness Realization in Speech Acts, such as invitations, compliments, and so forth; Chapter Six is the Conclusion of this thesis.