A Contrastive Analysis Of The Use Of Politeness Speech Acts In E-mail Exchanges Between Chinese And American University Students

The way people communicate with each other has been transformed by thedevelopment of Internet. Computer mediated communication (CMC) has becomepopular in people’s daily life. Politeness also can be found in CMC. But CMC is tosome extent different from other mediated communication, for example, face-to-facecommunication. It is a question whether the politeness theories in other mediatedcommunication can be applied in CMC, which has become a new research area inpoliteness research. Although Leech’s politeness research has developed fromPoliteness Principle to Grand Strategy of Politeness (GSP), extant empirical studiesincluding recent studies of politeness in CMC have applied Brown and Levinson’stheory. Few empirical studies have applied Leech’s theory. Therefore, this researchattempts to apply Leech’s (2007) GSP to conduct an empirical study on the use ofpoliteness speech acts in email exchanges between Chinese and American universitystudents.This research combines quantitative and qualitative methods. Based on the tenconstraints of GSP, this research contrastively analyzes the politeness speech acts inemail exchanges between44Chinese and44American university students. Thisresearch attempts to answer two research questions:1. What constraints of GSP areused by Chinese and American university students in email exchange? Whatpoliteness speech acts are applied to realize those constraints?2. What are thesimilarities and differences between Chinese and American university students’ usageof the constraints of GSP in email exchange?The research findings show that Chinese and American university studentsapplied constraint (A) to constraint (I) except constraint (J). Each applied constraint is realized by certain speech acts. The most frequently applied constraint by Chinese andAmerican students is constraint (E). The frequency order of the constraints applied bythe two groups of students is different.This research is an attempt to apply GSP in the ifeld of CMC. There arelimitations in the data collection and analysis part. Future studies are expected to beconducted to rectiyf the limitations so as to further develop the politeness research inCMC.