A Study Of Politeness Strategies In Fortress Besieged

Politeness is an important social norm for the improvement of the interpersonalcommunication. How to behave politely becomes a hot studying subject for linguists.Among the pragmatic studies of politeness, the most influencing theories are Leech’sPoliteness Principle and Brown&Levinson’s Theory of Politeness Strategies. Leech’sPoliteness Principle is an important principle for us to understand the politenessphenomena and Brown&Levinson’s Theory of Politeness Strategies is the essentialfoundation to guide the study on the collected data.Collecting the conversations between the hero and other people around him asstudying data from the novel Fortress Besieged written by the Chinese famous writerQian Zhongshu, the thesis tends to verify the universality and find out the limitationsof Brown&Levinson’s Theory of Politeness Strategies by analyzing the usage ofpoliteness strategies between Fang Hongjian and people of different genders, ages,social or family distance with Chinese as mother tongue in Fortress Besieged.Other than the classification analysis of the usage of politeness strategiesbetween certain people, the thesis uses tables to show the statistical data of the usageof politeness strategies among people of different genders, ages, social and familystatus so as to clarify the comparison of usage preference of politeness strategies.The thesis finds out that Brown&Levinson’s Theory of Politeness Strategiesturns out to be universal and people’s usage preference of politeness strategies arelargely influenced by different cultural backgrounds other than gender, age andrelative power, etc. Moreover, the frequent usage of more than one politeness strategysimultaneously smoothen the communication between interlocutors.