A contrastive study of politeness principle in Chinese and English culture 汉英礼貌用语的对比-研究.docVIP

A contrastive study of politeness principle in Chinese and English culture 汉英礼貌用语的对比研究 【Abstract】With the development of society and culture, communications between people become more and more important. As we all know, different people hold different views about politeness and different cultures may lead to pragmatic differences. Because of the cultural differences, sometimes what the Chinese people consider to be polite may not be true according to western culture. As a universal phenomenon, politeness is observed in every society, whose main functions are maintaining social order; maintaining friendly interpersonal relations; reducing conflicts and misunderstandings by means of polite speech acts so as to attain the aim of communication.To be polite, there are some principles to follow. This paper aims at describing these principles, and also focusing on a comparative study on Politeness Principle in Chinese and English cultures. 【Keyword】：Politeness Principle; difference; English culture; Chinese culture 1. Overview of the Politeness Principle In our daily life, we have to communicate with other people to get information, to gain knowledge about a topic or to reach a variety of goals. To be successful, one has to follow some important strategies. Besides the rule--- the Cooperative Principle(abbrev. CP) of the American language philosopher and linguist, H.P. Grice, who thought that in order to make the conversation go on, we should obey some basic principles, especially “Cooperative Principle”, bringing about a great development in the concept of conversational implicate, there exists another concept --- the Politeness Principle (abbrev. PP), which has above all been developed by Leech,a famous British linguist. In the centre of this concept does not stand the information of a conversation, but the effect of what is said on the people. 2.The basic contents of English and Chinese Politeness Principle 2. 1.Theories of the Politeness Principle Referring to Se