A Comparative Analysis Of Politeness Strategies In Chinese And English Culture

Politeness, as a symbol of human civilization, is a social-cultural as well as linguistic phenomenon that can be found in all languages and cultures. The western pragmatics researchers and scholars have performed a great deal of work and laid a quite solid foundation on politeness research in the last century. The two most influential and successful theories are Brown and Levinson's Face Theory and Leech's Politeness Principle. Later a few Chinese scholars have written some insightful articles on politeness in Chinese. Among them, Gu Yueguo(顾曰国) should be mentioned, who put forward his own set of politeness maxims in his "Politeness Phenomena in Modern Chinese"(1990). With the rapid development of science and technology, people from different countries and cultural backgrounds are making more and more communications. Thus more and more attention has been paid to what politeness is and how to be polite in cross-cultural interactions. Otherwise misunderstanding or even breakdown may occur frequently because of the cultural differences. This thesis is intended to make a comparative study of politeness between English and Chinese culture. On the contrastive analysis of the concepts of face, privacy, modesty, individualism, and so on, we could have a good insight into the differences of cultural values between English and Chinese. Despite its universality, politeness is to some extent culture-specific. Through a contrastive analysis, we know that cultural differences may influence the normal communication between the Chinese and Westerners. Therefore, to have some awareness of cultural differences will be helpful to people from different cultures in gaining successful communication.