A Study On Politeness Strategies Of Disagreement In Chinese

Politeness exists in all cultures. Politeness, an indispensable element in achieving a good result in conversation, is also of importance for keeping the good relations between the interlocutors and establishing a harmonious communicative atmosphere. Politeness appears to be a prevalent concept in human interactions, and studies pertaining to it have appeared in the literature from various perspectives. The present paper also follows the trend of politeness study. It explores politeness through a study of the speech act of disagreement in Chinese.Disagreement is selected as the springboard of this study due to its common occurrence in everyday human interactions, and, disagreement by its very nature is a face-threatening act that jeopardizes the solidarity between speaker and addressee and demands the employment of politeness strategies. Moreover, compared with studies on disagreement abroad, similar studies on disagreement of Chinese are few. This thesis is a study on disagreement strategies from the perspective of politeness in the Chinese mainland. This is the theoretical significance.This thesis is based on the face theory of Brown & Levinson (1987), which plays a leading role in the study of speech acts. Gu's theory (1990) on Chinese politeness also provides theoretical basis for this study. The data are collected through Discourse Completion Test (DCT). In the DCT, six scenarios are designed in accordance with six combinations of two variables: power and social distance. The Chinese university students are the subjects of this study. This thesis is to investigate different politeness strategies employed by Chinese male and female students when they express disagreement, mainly including positive politeness strategies and negative politeness strategies. It aims at the exploration of how disagreement gets accomplished and how concerns for face wants influence the application of politeness strategies in disagreement.Mao(1994), a Chinese scholar, holds that the Chinese concept of face does not...