A Cognitive Interpretation Of English And Chinese Politeness On Cultural Basis

It can hardly be denied that politeness pervades in different cultures though in daily life people seldom question its nature. The role of politeness, once studied in disciplines of social science, is far beyond specific politeness exchanges in daily life. Politeness has been a concern of various disciplines like pragmatics, sociology and sociolinguistics. Quite a few researches on politeness have been conducted and these researches turn out to be of value for follow-up researchers.Early researchers of politeness like Leech and Brown & Levinson put their emphasis on discovering politeness maxims and principles which, more or less, were considered to be universal communicative strategies in all cultures. In this stage, politeness is most frequently studied as a strategy in communication and the role of culture, if not never, is seldom taken into account. Later on, many researches came to be concerned with culture-specific politeness. People from different cultures are found to have different criteria on what is polite and what is not. The research of politeness came to a kind of socio-cultural stage. Many researches on the contrastive analysis of politeness fall into this category. Some Chinese scholars like Gu Yueguo and Mao Luming made some contribution in the study of politeness in Chinese culture. When it came to late 1990s, another approach of politeness research takes shape—the cognitive study of politeness under the theoretical framework of Relevance Theory. Escandell-Vidal is one of the most influential scholars in this approach.This thesis, based on an analysis of cultural differences between Chinese and English cultures, attempts to make a study on the interpretation of politeness in Chinese andEnglish under RT. And it is supposed to find out: politeness is equipped with different cultural values in two different languages; under RT politeness is a kind of optimal relevant expectation; the purpose of using politeness formulae in communication is to establish and maintain cognitive context between the speaker and the hearer to achieve communicative goals; cultural factors may have significant effects on cognitive context and therefore affect cognitive process of politeness in different cultures.