A Comparative Study On The Polite Language In English, Japanese And Chinese

Language guarantees harmonious interpersonal relationship. As the old saying goes "good remark warms one's heart in the coldest winter; whereas, verbal abuse freezes one's heart even in the warmest spring." This saying illustrates vividly the major role that language plays:a lubricant in social interactions. At the same time, communication with the outsiders has become inevitably even more frequent. We have more and more opportunities to contact with the outsiders. Consequently, it becomes more and more essential for us to learn to get along friendly with foreigners and to leave a polite message to them. This thesis focuses first on comparing the similarities and differences of polite language in English, Japanese and Chinese at the level of lexicon, syntax and pragmatics, and then it moves on to analyze the underlying reasons for generating these differences from the viewpoint of linguistic structure classification, value orientation and cultural diversities, polite maxims in the hope that it can give some inspiration to college foreign language teaching. Specifically speaking, the underlying reasons are generalized as follow:First, from the standpoint of linguistic structure, English is of inflectional language; Japanese is of agglutinative language and Chinese is of isolating language. Second, in terms of value orientation, for English, the typical value orientations are individualism orientation, privacy invasion and assertiveness; for Japanese and Chinese, the corresponding ones are group orientation, attitude warmth and self-abasement. Third, from the perspective of polite maxim preferences:for English, the tact maxim is the favored maxim that they first concerns, stressing on the sameness or the equality; as for Japanese and Chinese, the self-denigration-and-other-elevation maxim is of the most importance, stressing on hierarchy and differences in age and status.Based on the above comparison and analysis, this thesis proposes the following suggestions:First, the college foreign-language teachers can apply the theoretical findings of contrast in linguistic structure to practice. Second, both the teacher and the students should try their best to improve Chinese proficiency, especially communicative competence in Chinese. Third, the teacher and the students had better have a rich command of multi-disciplinary background knowledge.