A Comparative Study Of Politeness In English And Chinese: A Case Study

Politeness, which is a symbol of human civilization, is a crucial element for building a harmonious society. As a universal phenomenon, it plays a key role in establishing and maintaining social harmony, and prescribing individuals' behaviors. People from different cultures may have different views on what politeness is and how to be polite. Leech (1983) proposed a Polite Principle (PP) to explain why people violate the Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1967) in conversations. Gu (1992) rebuilt Leech's PP and proposed Five Maxims of Politeness with Chinese cultural characteristics. However, changes arise in some of polite expressions owing to the changes of times. It is believed that Chinese are greatly influenced by English, and Gu's Politeness Maxims seem not to be able to fully tally with modern Chinese.This paper is a tentative comparative study of politeness in English and Chinese. Based on the PP (Leech, 1983) and Politeness Maxims (Gu, 1992), some representative polite expressions from ten movies, including verbal and nonverbal ones, will be classified and compared. It focuses on the way of addressing, greeting and parting, as well as complementing. Considering the relationships between interlocutors, the comparison is not only made on these expressions between English and Chinese, but also on the frequency of their use. The findings show that some polite expressions in Chinese have been changing and weakening with the pace of globalization. At the present time, "hi" and "bye " are increasingly used in Chinese as well as in English when people are greeting and parting; foul language terms are often used to express politeness between intimates; "Thankyou" is frequently employed to respond to compliments.Based on the comparison, this thesis concludes that Gu's Politeness Maxims are not enough to account for the politeness phenomenon in modern China. It is necessary to modify Gu's Politeness Maxims, specifically, the Self-denigration Maxim, the Address-term Maxim, and the Refinement Maxim. The findings of present study have important implications for cross-cultural communication as well as English learning and teaching. Finally, the thesis points out some limitations of the present study in terms of sampling and data collection, which may shed light on future research.