Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Analysis Of Politeness In English And Chinese

As a social and communicational phenomenon, politeness exists in every society and language. It plays an important role in human communication. In this thesis, politeness is concentrated on the management of linguistic practice, rather than nonverbal actions, to maintain and promote harmonious social and international relationships. Successful communication and good communicative result mainly depend on appropriate polite languages. Politeness is closely related to social norms and values. Politeness is not only an observable social phenomenon, but also is reflection of specific cultural values in languages. Therefore, while admitting the universality of politeness, we must realize the cultural characteristics of politeness. That is to say, owing to the differences of cultural backgrounds, different peoples have different understanding of politeness. And languages differ greatly from culture to culture in expressing and judging politeness. In cross-cultural communication, interlocutors bear different cultural backgrounds and tend to evaluate others'behavior with the reference to one's own criteria. This makes the application of politeness strategies even more challenging. If people from one culture impose their own principles and criteria of politeness formulae on the people from another culture, the cross-cultural communication may break down. While exploring politeness, it is necessary for us to consider its cultural differences 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.Furthermore, nowadays with the growth of cross-cultural communication with different backgrounds, culture differences as well as the misunderstanding and conflicts seem to be more apparent. In view of such observations, this thesis intends to research into English and Chinese politeness from a cross-cultural perspective, which substantially improves the interlocutors'cultural awareness. Therefore, the exploration of differences on politeness used in English and Chinese, undoubtedly would increase the culture awareness of interlocutors, decrease pragmatic failure and help to achieve the effective cross-cultural communication. This thesis,as a whole,consists of six chapters,excluding the introduction and conclusion.The introduction deals with the definition of politeness, the purpose and the significance of the study and the structure of the thesis.Chapter One reviews the studies of politeness by the Western and Chinese scholars. Chapter Two introduces 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, which serve as the theoretical framework for the whole thesis. Besides, the definition of pragmatics, pragmatic failure, pragmatic competence, and the definition of culture, the relationship of culture, politeness and language are also brief explained in this chapter.Chapter Three deals with research questions, subjects in the study, instruments and data collection. The subjects of this study are two groups: one group is composed of 63 Chinese freshmen (non-English major) from Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine; the other group includes 45 native speakers of English. Questionnaires are delivered to collect data. In this study, the differences between the two groups are investigated from three perspectives: 1) the differences in terms of address used by the two groups; 2) the differences in refusal strategies caused by social status for each group; 3) the differences in compliment responses used by the two groups.Chapter Four makes an analysis on the corpus and the results show that the two groups bear statistically significant differences in the realization of politeness in the three speech acts. Chapter Five is devoted to explore the deep social cultural reasons which give rise to such differences, for example, power, solidarity, social status, individualism and collectivism. So acknowledgement in politeness strategies and understanding English and Chinese cultural backgrounds will help to apply politeness strategies properly, to improve the competence of using English of English language learners and to strengthen the success of cross-cultural communication.Chapter Six presents some implications of this study for cross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching and learning. Finally, the thesis comes to the conclusion and shortcoming of the study.