Indirectness And Appropriateness Of Politeness In Language

Politeness is a kind of moral norm for people to behave in their daily life. It represents peoples' efforts in maintaining harmonious relationship between each other. From 1970s, politeness has been drawn much attention by linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists who have tried to explain polite phenomenon from various aspects. Politeness in language, as the most effective and frequent way to expressing politeness, is necessary to be studied deeply. In other people's previous studies, politeness in language's two important aspects (indirectness and appropriateness), especially appropriateness have not been paid enough attention. This thesis intends to study these two aspects from the perspective of pragmatics.Beginning with the Speech Act Theory (SAT) and Indirect Speech Act Theory (ISA), we discuss indirectness and appropriateness from several aspects. On the basis of Brown& Levinson's Face-Threating Acts Theory (FTA) and Leech's Politeness Principle (PP), there are several pragmatic functions of indirect expressions in politeness strategy, such as euphemistic request and command, euphemistic refusal and euphemistic criticism etc.. Indirectness application in politeness is influenced by many factors, such as power, social distance, the size of imposition, right and obligation and cultural difference, these factors will be analyzed in order.The most polite form on one occasion may turn out to be too polite or not polite enough when the occasion changes. Context is one of the most important factors to affect the appropriate adaptation of politeness. Therefore all discussions about appropriateness of politeness should be based on context. In addition, we cite the criterion of appropriateness in polite expression which is proposed by Zhang Guo (2005). It is dicussed from two levels: inner linguistic level and outer linguistic level. The part of inner linguistic level can be divided into linguistic content and linguistic form. And outer linguistic level is analyzed from cultural factors and social factors. The result shows that all the factors in the criterion system are not isolated. If one element changes, others should be adjusted. To sum up, the present thesis has discussed two aspects of politeness in language. Some ideas and argumentations are far from mature. The author hopes this thesis may exert a little strength and function to draw more valuable opinions from all sides in this field. And it may also provide with some helpful references to build up harmonious relationship in communication.