Abstract

Politeness serves as an instrumental device to eliminate conflicts, enhance relations and maintain social orders in conversations. However, due to cultural differences, people may have misunderstandings about politeness in intercultural communication. This paper first makes a theoretical comparison of Leech’s Politeness Principle and Gu Yueguo’s Five Notions for politeness so as to find out the differences between them. Then, it makes a pragmatic contrast of the different applications of politeness from the perspectives of address term, compliments and taboos and the causes of differences are analyzed from cultural background, value system and thinking pattern. As the results have demonstrated, a good grasp of the differences in politeness expressions between English and Chinese and the effective employment of politeness expressions is highly beneficial for eliminating barriers in cross-cultural communications.

Key words: politeness, pragmatic contrast，cultural differences, cross-cultural communication

摘要

礼貌作为一种重要的交际手段，在对话中发挥着减少冲突、加强联系和维持社会秩序的重要作用。然而，由于文化差异，人们会在跨文化交际中对礼貌产生误解。本文首先从理论上对比了里奇的礼貌原则和顾曰国的礼貌五项准则，探讨了二者之间的区别。然后从称呼、恭维以及禁忌语等方面对礼貌进行了语用分析，从文化背景、价值观以及思维方式三方面分析了造成这些差异的原因。本文的研究结果表明，充分掌握英汉礼貌在表达上的差异并恰当运用礼貌表达可以有效减少跨文化交际中的误解。

关键词：礼貌；语用对比；文化差异；跨文化交际

1.  Introduction
As a kind of complex cultural phenomenon, politeness exists in all sorts of human civilizations, and has been applied in every aspect of human’s life. As its definition goes, politeness is to behave or speak in a way that is correct for the social situation you are in, and to show that you are careful to consider other people’s feelings and needs. It’s an indispensable element that ensures the fluent and coherent verbal and other forms of interactions. With the rise of pragmatics, the study of politeness has become a focus in the latest 20 years. Researches have shown that the use of politeness principle literally pervades every aspect of language use. And with a fair proportion of functions, politeness exerts favorable impacts on eliminating conflicts caused by intercultural misunderstandings, enhancing relations and even maintaining social orders.
However, sociologists tell us that as cultures are diverse, so are languages. It is then only natural that with differences in cultures and languages, difficulties often arise in communication between people from different cultures and people’s understanding of politeness differs more or less.