A Study Of How Politeness Strategies Are Applied In Modern Chinese: A Relevance Theory Approach

Politeness has been a major research area in the past study of linguistic pragmatics. The linguistic circle around the world has witnessed the heyday of politeness studies in the past three decades esp. in the past 15 years when huge amounts of research papers on politeness were published. This area was pioneered by two famous linguists Brown & Levinson (1978, 1987) , from whose theory there emerged a linguistic trend that holds the opinion that violation of the Cooperative Principles is due to politeness concerns, or more specifically, due to face-saving concerns. This theory has, to a large extent, been a successful one, but it has too many presumptions, for which this theory seems not to hold water.In these years, the cognitive approach to the linguistic studies has been a major trend. And politeness studies echo this trend by taking the cognitive factors into consideration. In this thesis, the Relevance Theory is adopted to indicate that all kinds of Politeness Strategies used in modern Chinese are in fact representations of the Relevance Theory. It seems that the Relevance Theory can better explain why politeness should be observed when the classical 'Grice's Cooperative Principles' are violated sometimes in conversation and thus makes contribution to politeness studies.