A Contrastive Study Of Politeness Discourses In Business Chinese And Business English Textbooks

With the globalization, not only people's demand in deepening the understanding, communication and study of each other become more and more intense, but also the business communication becomes more and more frequent. China has always been considered as the nation of rite. Therefore, there are many problems loom large to China, such as, how to make the Chinese speak fluent English and use the appropriate politeness strategy at the same time, how to teach English-speaking culture foreigners to use appropriate and polite Chinese in the business communication with Chinese people. In the recent years, lots of linguists paid much attention to the research of the language application as well as the politeness theory and phenomenon. However, the new and unique perspective of this thesis, in which the politeness and discourse analysis were combined to analyze the structure, function and pragmatic strategy of the politeness discourses in the business language, is rarely seen.This thesis aimed at summarizing the similarity and differences of the politeness discourses between English and Chinese in the business textbooks through the contrastive analysis in different business scenes, in order to give some measures for the business language learning and teaching to avoid the inappropriateness of using politeness strategy. In the contrastive analysis, the author found the general constraint of the social factors to the politeness as well as the cultural factors which causes the cultural differences of the politeness discourses. Thus the causes of the similarity and differences of the politeness discourses were summarized in three perspectives. Finally, suggestions and measures are proposed from the perspective of the language user/ learner and the foreign language teaching.