A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And Western Pragmatic Differences From The Perspective Of Politeness Principle

In our daily life, politeness phenomena penetrate the process of human’s communicative behaviors. It plays a crucial role in constraining people’s behaviors, establishing interpersonal relationships, maintaining social harmony. With the rapid development of the researches of intercultural communication, how to define politeness and how to behave appropriately and politely in cross-cultural communications have increased people’s awareness and interests worldwide.In the meantime, politeness is also a major subject in modern linguistics. Great importance has been attached to studies of politeness phenomenon and politeness principles. Brown and Levinson’s face theory and Leech’s politeness principles promote the development of politeness. Chinese scholars Gu Yueguo, Mao luming, Robert amend and supplement them on the basis of the western scholars’ principles. We should realize that the difference between China and the West leads to different polite languages and judge criteria. Failure in cross-cultural communication would occur if one behaves or judges people from other nations just according to social conventions or culture values of his own. Since politeness is indeed positive to intercultural communication and Foreign Language Learning, a clear contrastive analysis of the differences of politeness in English and Chinese culture can be very crucial to the study of Linguistics. Via the Politeness theories in Pragmatics, this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of between English and Chinese pragmatics differences as well as the cultural values which cause the differences. Some implications and suggestions on Cross-Cultural Communication and Foreign Language Leaching and are put forward in the thesis as well.The thesis is divided into 4 chapters. Its main contents are as follows:Chapter One is the introduction, which briefly introduces the definition of politeness. It reviews and generalizes the theories of politeness that have been proposed by scholars from home and abroad.Chapter Two identifies through contrastive analysis the differences expressions between Chinese and English.Chapter Three discusses the cultural factors which account for the pragmatics differences between western countries and China and to relate the identified differences with specific cultural patterns, values and backgrounds.Chapter Four discusses the values of Chinese people change, so Gu’s Politeness Maxims are not enough to account for the politeness phenomenon in modern China.The last part is conclusion, which is puts forward some suggestions on Foreign Language Learning, gives a summary of the whole thesis.