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In western countries, there are three important kinds of politeness principles (pp).They are Lakoff’s pragmatic conflict-avoidance strategy of politeness, Leech’s maxim-and-principle approach to politeness and Brown’s face-saving view of politeness. Compared with other two principles, Leech’s politeness principle is more complete. His principle contains six maxims, which are all followed: Tact, Generosity, Approbation, Modesty, Agreement and Sympathy.
We know that the concept of politeness is so common, but its origins and connotations are special due to the different culture. In china, politeness is quite different from the culture of western countries. The reason is that Chinese linguistics did not build politeness as a separate branch until very recently. The most famous principle is proposed by Gu Yueguo. He published “politeness, pragmatics and culture”. His theories maybe connected with western principle, but they have their own distinctive characteristics of Chinese culture.
After a detailed research of the theories above, we can find that the representative western principles consider that politeness is a pragmatic phenomenon, on the contrary, Chinese politeness principle is related to social norms.
3. Politeness Principles in Chinese and English
The cultural backgrounds in Chinese and English are different and the native speakers have different mentality. Because the politeness is an part of the inside culture, it has its culture-specific content, however, politeness is also a common phenomenon, so there is certain common ground between politeness in different cultural backgrounds. English principle can be summarized by Leech’s six maxims. Based on Leech’s theory, GU has established Chinese politeness principle. In this chapter, I will introduce English and Chinese politeness principles one by one.
3.1 English Politeness Principle Proposed by Leech
Leech is one of the first people to adopt the principle to analyze politeness. His theory identifies the politeness of English cultural. He thought that in a conversation, there may be two person, one is self, and the other one we can call it other. In this discussion, self is regarded as the speaker while the other is called the hearer. But the two speakers also pay attention to the emotion to the third part.
3.1.1 Tact
The tact maxim concerns a minimizing cost to other and maximizing benefit to other. Here we can see 2 sides of it, a negative side –minimize the cost to other, and a positive side--maximize the benefit to other. The second is less important, the reason is that it belongs to a natural result of the first part. So the meaning of this maxim is that the speaker must try his best not to express what he trust that suggest cost or harm to the hearer. Here are two examples.