A Model For Analyzing Chinese Utterance Politeness

The aim of this thesis is to provide a comparatively systematic approach to case study of Chinese utterance politeness. In recent decades, utterance politeness has attracted broad attention. Based on the review of former approaches, the author finds that these approaches are mainly aimed at providing theories for one stage or several aspects of utterance politeness, and a study for the whole process is needed. What's more, most of the approaches should be modified when introduced to account for Chinese politeness phenomena.The author argues that the speaker, the hearer, the utterance as well as the background of the speaker, the hearer and the third party (if there is a third party) are indispensable in any case of utterance politeness. Shils, Wolfson together with Brown and Levinson have made initial or partial discussions on the background of the speaker and the hearer. However, it cannot be concluded from their discussions which factors should take priority for consideration. The author divides the background of the speaker and the hearer into two parts- vertical distance, namely the difference of their social status or family positions, and horizontal distance, namely their intimacy degree. Then the author points out that in China, a country with thousands of years' history of feudalism, vertical distance takes priority over horizontal distance. The author introduces the notion of "vertical distance and horizontal distance" into analysis of how the relationship between a third party, the speaker and the hearer results in the necessity of the utterance politeness. It is found that when a third party is considered, horizontal distance wins an advantage over vertical distance. The author concludes after argument that the distance between the speaker, the hearer and the third party is the objective condition of the utterance politeness, while the speaker's intention of communication is the subjective condition. The author applies the concept of "informative intention" and "communicative intention" suggested by Sperber and Wilson to account for the speaker's intention. The conclusion is that when the speaker at this time not only expects to convey the message of politeness to the hearer, but also expects the hearer to understand that his intention is indeed to show politeness.The objective and subjective conditions of utterance politeness make the actual need for utterance politeness. As the tool conveying politeness, utterance is necessary to be investigated. The utterance meanings include semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning. Semantically the author borrows the model of Chomsky to show that lexicon meaning and grammatical meaning should be examined for utterance meaning. Pragmatically the author adopts Leech's PP and meanwhile suggests that necessary modifications be made according to Chinese culture. For example, Modesty Maxim goes further from " Maximize dispraise of self proposed by Leech to "Maximize denigration of self." The hearer's appropriate understanding for the utterance, which results from the combination of the hearer's knowledge and information available, is crucial for the realization of utterance politeness.The author investigates in details every stage of the process that utterance politeness is realized, and summarizes the whole process with a model. And consequently, the author applies the model to the data in Lin Yutang's novel Moment in Peking, which aroused great interest home and abroad. The application justifies the feasibility of the model.The significance of the research is that it provides a comparatively complete and systematic model for utterance politeness analysis in case study. The author suggests that utterance politeness be studied materialistically and systematically.