Research On Politeness Principles

With the trend of globalization, people with certain culture backgrounds have more chances to contact people with other cultural backgrounds. However, some people are suffering from inevitable intercultural barriers on account of their insistence to evaluate other's behaviors by their respective existing politeness standards. Therefore, there is a significance to carry on a study about the politeness principles in different cultures.Politeness principle, as a mechanism guiding social communication, reflects the particular culture it stands for. Besides its advantages in explaining intercultural communication, the politeness principle has some shortcomings, for people with different cultures have different values that determine the constitution and application of the politeness principle. Therefore, we should familiarize ourselves with what the politeness principle is and its use; and learn to employ appropriate strategies in the process of intercultural communication.In this thesis, first we introduced the meaning and the background of the study, and reviewed other scholars'researches, such as the cooperative principle proposed by Grice, the politeness principle proposed by Leech and Gu Yueguo. As Leech's theory and Gu's theory are the representative of British politeness principle and Chinese politeness principle study, we choose these theories to make a contrast study of different sets of politeness principle. Then we analyzed the similarities and the differences between them and also made some comments on the advantages and the limitations of politeness principle in intercultural communication, pointing out that due to the differences among people from high-context cultures and low-context cultures, the criteria of tact and modesty are also different. Then we introduce the social and cultural factors which affect the constitution of the politeness principle, indicating that the politeness principle is cultural-specific, not universal. So we just design a research and hope that we can come up with the idea which can offer suggestions to solve the problems. We choose some students who typically belong to polychronic cultures as well as monochronic cultures, according to Hofstede's theory of culture dimensions, as our questionnaire subjects. After analysis the data we put forward some suggestions, suggesting that we should take into account social and cultural elements that would affect our ways of being polite when engaged in intercultural communication activities.