A Contrastive Study Of Geoffrey Leech’s And Gu Yueguo’s Politeness Principle And Its Implications For Cross-cultural Communication

Politeness is a social and linguistic phenomenon that exists in almost every culture. It exercises its restraints upon people’s speech acts, which is helpful to maintain harmonious relationships and promote social interactions. As an important phenomenon in speech communication, politeness has been a hot topic studied by many linguists and scholars for a long time. This thesis tries to make a contrast of Leech’s Politeness Principle and Gu Yueguo’s Politeness Principle which can represent the Western and Chinese politeness theory model respectively, and to find out the reasons for the differences. By contrasting the two politeness principles, this thesis gets the conclusion that the Agreement Maxim and Tact Maxim of Leech’s Politeness Principle are in conformity with the Accordance Maxim and the Virtue Maxim of Gu’s Politeness Principle respectively, and that the Modesty Maxim of Leech’s Politeness Principle is in partial overlap with the Self-denigration of Gu Yueguo’s Politeness Principle, et al. It is people’s common realization of the world that causes the similarities, which shows that both of the politeness principles are of certain universality. Apart from the similarities, there are many differences between the two politeness principles, like the use of addressing, people’s attitude toward modesty and praise, and in the use of refined language, et al. The major reason for the differences results from different cultural values, for Chinese politeness attaches more importance to "others-orientation" while the Western politeness is more "self-orientated". The contrastive analysis of the two politeness principle can make readers have a better understanding of politeness features in Western and Chinese culture, which can exert its implications on cross-cultural communication, including the foreign language teaching and learning, the verbal communication among people from different cultures, and the English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation.