A Chinese-Japanese Contrastive Study Of Discourse Politeness Strategies Via Degree Of Intimacy

Discourse politeness comprises politeness and impoliteness.Within pragmatic politeness,it presents the dynamics of function at the levels of a sentence,an expression,and a discourse,playing a pivotal role in daily conversation.It is well known that discourse politeness has become popular in pragmatics.Although politeness and impoliteness are intertwined and inseparable,cross-cultural contrastive studies have hitherto been rarely conducted within the same theoretical framework.To fill this research gap,this study analyzes and compares the characteristics of discourse politeness strategies between Chinese and Japanese under the same theoretical framework.The data used in this study include the small talks of native Japanese speakers in the different intimate relationships in the BTSJ natural conversation corpus(March,2021 edition)and its homogeneous Chinese counterparts.Drawing on Rapport Management Model,Universal Theory of Politeness,and Discourse Politeness Theory,a comprehensive conversation analysis and cross-linguistic contrastive approach are employed to address the following research questions:(1)What are the characteristics of the small talks produced by native Chinese speakers in terms of the types and defaults of pragmatic acts,the discourse politeness strategies and the corresponding interpersonal relationships?(2)How are native Japanese speakers behave in the small talks of different intimate relationships in the aspects of the types and defaults of pragmatic acts,the discourse politeness strategies and the corresponding interpersonal relationships?(3)To what extent do Chinese and Japanese native speakers correspond and differ at the dimensions of pragmatic acts defaults,discourse politeness strategies and interpersonal relationships?This study consists of seven chapters.The background,research object,research significance and the framework is introduced in Chapter 1.The following Chapter 2reviews the origin and development of discourse politeness research,the current discourse politeness research in China and Japan,the current comparative discourse politeness research in Chinese and Japanese,and the universality of “face”.Chapter 3describes theoretical foundations of the study including rapport management model,the universal theory of politeness and discourse politeness theory,and presents the background of the research questions and the specific problems,the research methods,the coding criteria of Wx and discourse politeness strategies,and the assignment criteria of politeness strategies.Chapter 4 and 5 investigate the characteristics of small talks in different intimate relationships in the aspects of defaults of pragmatic acts,discourse politeness strategies and the resulting interpersonal relationships produced by native Chinese speakers and native Japanese speakers,respectively.Chapter 6 explores the similarities and differences between native Chinese speakers and native Japanese speakers in these three respects.Chapter 7 concludes with a summary of the findings,innovations,contributions,shortcomings,and future issues.Analysis of the data yields the following major findings.Firstly,both native Chinese speakers and native Japanese speakers use three types of pragmatic acts,i.e.,rapport enhancement orientation,rapport maintenance orientation,and rapport challenge orientation,yet they vary in small talks of different intimate relationships.During the unfamiliar relationships,the default of pragmatic acts employed by both parties remains the rapport maintenance orientation,whereas the intimate relationships,native Japanese speakers prefer the pragmatic act of rapport maintenance orientation,and native Chinese speakers tend to employ the pragmatic act of rapport enhancement orientation.Second,both native Chinese speakers and native Japanese speakers use macro strategies,figurative strategies,and output strategies,and some of the strategies are significantly different in terms of gender and intimacy.Lastly,discourse politeness strategies used by both parties in small talks exert influence on the resulting interpersonal relationships.Both similarities and differences are found in the future interpersonal orientation presented by the face balance maps between native Chinese speakers and native Japanese speakers.This study contributes to the extant literature in the following ways.It first refines the classification criteria of pragmatic acts,and explores the parallel study of politeness strategies and impoliteness strategies in Chinese and Japanese.Then,it visualizes the dynamic development process of interpersonal relationships between native Chinese speakers and native Japanese speakers by assigning values to the formula of face-threatening acts.Lastly,it investigates the differences between Chinese and Japanese small talks in terms of pragmatic acts,discourse politeness strategies and interpersonal relationships.