摘要

众所周知，不同的人对礼貌持有不同的观点,而不同的文化又会导致语用差异。由于英汉文化之间存在着差异，有时中国人认为礼貌的行为西方人未必认同。要使言语行为有礼貌，有些礼貌原则必须遵守，比如H. P. Grice提出的言语交际中的合作原则，Geoffrey N. Leech提出的礼貌原则，中国境内著名的有顾曰国教授在中国“礼貌”观念的基础上所提出的五条礼貌理念。本文简要的概述了这些礼貌原则，并且对中西礼貌原则做了对比分析。此外，本文还试图指出英汉文化间存在的礼貌语用差异,比如：称呼语，问候，感谢等等。虽然这些差异表明在自然生活中，英汉礼貌原则存在相似性，但是二者之间的差异在跨文化交际中也同样起着重要的作用。因此，对英汉礼貌原则进行对比分析就显得越发的重要。同时，在跨文化交际中，了解对方的文化背景，以及选择正确的礼貌原则也是非常重要的。

关键词： 礼貌;礼貌原则;语用差异;跨文化交际

Abstract

As we all know, different people hold different views about politeness and different cultures may lead to pragmatic differences. Because of the cultural differences, sometimes what the Chinese people consider to be polite may not be true according to western culture. To be polite, there are some principles to follow, such as H. P. Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Geoffrey N. Leech’s Politeness Principle, and in China, there are Prof. Gu Yueguo’s five notions of politeness based on the Chinese conception of limao. This paper briefly describes these principles, and also makes a comparative study on Politeness Principle in Chinese and English cultures. Besides, this paper also attempts to shed light on some of the pragmatic differences on politeness between Chinese and western cultures, such as addressing, greeting, thanking etc., indicating that typical Chinese and English politeness principles are similar to each other in nature but the differences between them are also playing a significant role in intercultural speech interaction. So the comparative study of Politeness Principle in Chinese and English cultures becomes more important. Meanwhile, to be familiar with the different cultural backgrounds and to choose the right politeness maxims during communication are also very important.

Key Words： politeness; politeness principle; pragmatics differences; intercultural communication

1.    Introduction

As a universal phenomenon in all societies, politeness is what people of different cultural backgrounds all try to observe for the purpose of improving communicative competence. Being an important element in intercultural communication, politeness helps establish, maintain or consolidate harmonious interpersonal relationships, and reduces conflicts and misunderstandings. Therefore, principles of politeness in different cultures should be investigated. This thesis attempts to make a comparative study of politeness behavior between the English and the Chinese on the contrastive analyses on such linguistic behaviors as addressing, greeting, thanking. Owing to different beliefs and values, and different cultural backgrounds, these cultural differences of politeness are of great importance in cross-cultural communication.