A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Politeness Phenomenon In The Rural Life Of Northeastern China

Politeness phenomenon has been a topic for discussion for a long time in the field ofpragmatics. There have been numerous research fruits about linguistic politeness. Amongthem, Politeness Principle of Leech and Face Theory of Brown&Levinson are the mostprominent. As far as Chinese politeness is concerned, Gu Yueguo and L. R. Mao bothcontribute their theories associated with Chinese culture. The author of the thesis is alsointerested in the universality and cultural identity of politeness standard. In recent years,many researchers applied linguistic theories to the analysis of films and televisionprograms successfully. The author takes the dialogues of Country Love as the corpus ofanalysis in order to observe and testify the applicability of the previous theories and findnew possibilities.The relationship between culture and language will be a major issue in this thesis.China has a unified system of written language and literature, but the local cultures inChina are various. The inhabitants of northeastern China have developed their uniqueregional culture in their daily life. The TV play Country Love, which was produced byZhao Benshan, unfolds a vivid life picture of the common villagers by the depiction oftrivial matters in daily life. There are no exiting events in the play. All the dialogues are thecommon and casual conversations among family members, friends, colleagues andacquaintances. The actors speak natural and simple northeastern dialect. The author mainlydiscusses how politeness is generated and measured in the culture of this area reflected bythe TV play.In the process of collecting and analyzing the corpus from the TV series, we havefound that the northeastern area has its preference and focus in cultural features eventhough it inherits the traditional Chinese culture. For instance, the advocation of filial pietyand blood relationship is put to an extreme. Linguistic politeness in this area not onlyshares some common features mentioned in previous theories, but also demonstrates itsspecific characteristics. In the author’s opinion, according to the analysis of the dialogues,face is the ratification and approval obtained from family, friends or acquaintances basedon one’s existential value. Politeness is a strategy directed by interest and based upon group or individual customary expressions. It changes in different contexts. On surface,politeness is shown to maintain face. In a deeper sense, it is used to gain interests. Thepoliteness pattern demonstrated in the play is as follows: politeness is shown to all inone’s social circle; as to those outside one’s social circle, politeness is nowhere to find.There are four factors which count in linguistic politeness: the awareness of interest, theawareness of social strata, the awareness of closeness and the awareness of modesty. Theyplay an important role in the formation of the regional politeness pattern. The first factor isthe most important one.In comparison with classical theories, the main findings of this thesis lie in the revealof the fact that interest relationship influences the politeness strategy everyone chooses inconversations. What is more, it makes a new arrangement of the degree of importance ofthe above four factors in Chinese politeness awareness against a local cultural background.