The Contrastive Study Of Politeness Principles In English And Chinese Social Deixis

Social deixis is the indicator of social distinctions between the participants in interpersonal communication, especially it reveals the social relationship between addresser and addressee or addresser and some other referent. It gives prominence to the relative social status of the addresser and addressee and it projects different cultures. Social deixis indicates the addresser’s attitude toward the addressee as well as the social relationship and status between them. It helps us to interpret the utterances properly. Social deixis mainly consists of personal pronouns, address terms (e.g. Kinship terms, Honorifics and Terms of humility), stylistic varieties, some lexical forms and grammatical forms in natural languages.Politeness is of different definition in different cultures. The universal feature of politeness is that addressers of all languages and members of all cultures share the concept of politeness and it can be observed in all human interactions. It helps to maintain the interpersonal relations and enhance the mutual feelings. Chinese scholars tend to stress the association of politeness with social and moral values. Meanwhile, the western scholars have a tendency of regarding politeness as a way to avoid offenses and maintain social distance asell as social lubricant of reducing interpersonal friction. This difference is owing to different cultural backgrounds between the Western and Chinese researchers.In recent years, many people make studies on language phenomena in verbal communications from the perspective of pragmatics. This thesis intended to use the politeness principles to analyze the social deixis in conversations from some literary works, movies and everyday life. Through the contrastive study of politeness principles between Chinese and English social deixis, the author intended to find out the application differences of politeness principles in Chinese and English communications.Through the contrastive study of politeness principles in Chinese and English social deixis, this thesis found that there lies great differences in politeness principles between Chinese and English social deixis. Chinese social deixis ended to use indirect politeness strategies, meanwhile, people often choose the self-denigration maxim in order to elevate the addressee’s social status and lower the addresser’s social status. On the contrary, English social deixis tended to use direct politeness strategies, at the same time, they seldom choose the self-denigration maxim but sometimes-use modesty maxim. The conclusion of this thesis can give better guidance to the application of politeness principles in verbal communication.