A Comparative Study Of The English Politeness Principle Represented By Geoffrey Leech And The Chinese One Represented By Gu Yueguo And Its Implications For Cross-cultural Communication

Politeness is a social compass for judging people's words and deeds in a certain culture. As a universal social phenomenon, it has been observed in all languages and cultures, which plays a key role in prescribing people's linguistic behavior and maintaining harmonious social relationship and communication activities.Nowadays, the cross-cultural communication has been increasingly growing with the globalization trend, however, due to cultural differences, it differs greatly from one another in expressing and understanding politeness, thus misunderstanding and conflicts become more apparent. In view of such observations, by a comparative study of the English Politeness Principle represented by Geoffrey Leech and the Chinese one represented by Gu Yueguo, it undoubtedly will increase interlocutors'cross-cultural awareness, decrease pragmatic failure and help achieve the effective cross-cultural communication. On the one hand, because of the universal nature of politeness, the common emotional need and the social communication need, there are similarities at the pragmatic level and the specific maxims level between the English Politeness Principle and the Chinese one including scales, conflicts between different principles, the appropriateness, the goal-orientation and the agreement about relationship. On the other hand, owing to deep reasons in the light of the individualism versus collectivism, the family structure: simple versus complicated, the privacy versus attitudinal warmth and the sense of hierarchy versus equality, there are also striking differences between the English Politeness Principle and the Chinese one including different emphases of Self-denigration and Other-elevation Maxim, different relationships to moral and differences in Address Maxim. Meanwhile, it should be pointed out that, with the continuous advance of Chinese and western cultural exchange, the Chinese Politeness Principle has taken up profound changes: the Politeness Principle in China more and more reflects the self-awareness and more and more embodies the sense of freedom and equality; Chinese come to realize the awareness of privacy; Politeness forms have been simplifying and even missing.The methodology mainly used in this paper is contrastive analysis. Besides, definition, exemplification, induction, deduction and figures are adopted as well.This paper, as a whole, consists of nine chapters. Chapter one is an introduction which states the purpose and significance of the study, the main contents, the methodology as well as the organization. Chapter two is literature review, which is about the previous studies on the Politeness Principle home and abroad. Chapter three intends to introduce the English Politeness Principle proposed by Leech and the Chinese one proposed by Gu Yueguo. Chapter four identifies the differences between the English Politeness Principle and the Chinese one through contrastive analysis. Chapter five discusses similarities between the English Politeness Principle and the Chinese one. Chapter six tries to explore reasons for differences and similarities. Chapter seven points out that the Chinese Politeness Principle has taken up profound changes. Chapter eight is implications for cross-cultural communication. Chapter nine makes a conclusion, summing up the contents of the whole thesis, pointing out limitations and giving suggestions for further study.