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This thesis is intended to provide a contrastive study of linguistic politeness in English and Chinese from a cross-cultural perspective. By analyzing the cultural values underlying the superficial differences in actual linguistic ways, the author expects to raise the language learners’ cultural awareness in international communication.
II. Literature Review on Courtesy Language studies
Politeness is a very common phenomenon existing in social and group which is the symbol of human civilization and the tool of maintaining interpersonal harmony. In different culture backgrounds it has different meanings. People should comply with the politeness principles in order to avoid the failures caused by different politeness.
2.1 Studies of Politeness in the West
1) Brown and Levinson’s “face” theory
Politeness, in the interaction, can then be defined as the means employed to show awareness of another person’s face.
Early in the 1950s, G.offman, the United States Scholar, put forward the “Face Behavior Theory” from sociology. Then in 1978, Brown and Levinson further put forward the “Mature Face Theory” which tried to take face as a common language phenomenon to research on the basis of Goffman in their work of Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomena. The Mature Face Theory of Brown and Levinson is the first time to discuss the face problems of politeness systematically from anthropology and philosophy. They thought that face is, for every social member, wanted to gain for the public self-image of them. In the process of interaction, people hope each other can maintain each other's face. Along with the face threat increasing, people use the higher politeness strategies to maintain their face. The face threat level depends on the difference of social distance and social power between the communications.
Brown and Levinson pides the face into positive face and negative face. Then politeness is also pided into the positive manner and negative manner. Its distinction
between positive and negative politeness strategies can shed very considerable light on cultural differences of politeness when examining cross-cultural data.
2) Grice Cooperative Principle
Grice, an American linguist, put forward the Cooperative Principle in people’s conversation. He thought that, “in all the communication, the speaker and listener should follow some principles which make the process of communication develop toward the tacit understanding and cooperation. There are four maxims to embody the Cooperative Principle (Grice ,1989):
(a) Quantity Maxim: the information you offer should accord with the conversation, just the right amount.
(b) Quality maxim: what you said should be reasonable and true.
(c) Relevant maxim: what you said should be related to the content of the front.
(d) Manner maxim: the word you said should be terse, clear, and systematical.
But some people do not comply with this social principle; even some of them violate those in social communication. In other words, the Cooperative Principle can't completely contain the kinds of conversation. According to this, the English linguist Leech thought the root of people violating the Cooperative Principle is that they want to comply with another principles—Politeness principle. From the Pragmatics and Interpersonal Rhetoric, Leech summed up and classified the Politeness Principle during the social communication. Leech pointed that: the Cooperative Principle guides what we should say, so as to meet the expectations. However, the politeness principle can be maintained the friendship. So the Cooperation Principles and politeness principles can make a supplement each other which restrict people's conversation behaviors.
3) Leech’s Politeness Principle
English scholar Leech, in his principles of pragmatics, put forward his politeness principle on the basis of Grice framework. He believed that,” besides Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle guides and constrains rational people’s conversation as well. It is closely connected with Cooperative Principle. Yet on the other hand, it solves the problem why people prefer to use indirect speech in conversation, which cooperative principle can not explain”. In Leech’s view (1983), the maxims of the Politeness Principle are as follows: