Abstract

Politeness is a common phenomenon in the social life, and it is widely used during our communication. How to communicate with others politely and successfully is very important. Leech proposed the Politeness Principle which includes six maxims.
This paper studies Leech’s Politeness Principle through the analysis of Friends. How the characters follow Politeness Principle in their daily life will be analysed and some good advice about how to communicate politely will be provided in this paper,.

Key words:     Politeness Principle; communication; Friends

摘 要

    礼貌本是人们社会生活中极其平常的一种现象，它也在我们日常生活中被广泛的使用。因此如何正确地并有礼貌地与人沟通显得尤为重要。Leech提出了礼貌原则，它主要包含了六大准则。
本文通过美国情景喜剧——《老友记》，来逐一分析Leech的礼貌原则。在分析剧里人物在日常生活沟通中是如何遵守礼貌原则的同时，也给人们在沟通中如何更有礼貌进行会话提供一些好的建议。

关键词： 礼貌原则；沟通；《老友记》

1.    Introduction
    In our daily life, our communication may always end up with failure. There are many causes. General speaking, improper language and rude language are the main causes of unsuccessful communication . In order to avoid this kind of failure, we should learn to be polite. Being polite shows speaker’s good manners and consideration for the other party. So it is very important for us to learn how to speak politely. It is also an important symbol of civilization and development in human history. What’s more, it is a criterion for all human activities.
  Based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Leech proposed another pragmatic principle—Politeness Principle. It has six maxims, including tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, modesty maxim, agreement maxim and sympathy maxim. And every maxim has two secondary rules. Tact maxim includes minimizing cost to other and maximizing benefit to others. Generosity maxim includes minimizing benefit to self and maximizing cost to self. Approbation maxim contains two aspects—minimizing dispraise of others and maximizing praise of others. Modesty maxim includes minimizing praise of self and maximizing dispraise of self. Agreement maxim includes minimizing disagreement between self and others and maximizing agreement between self and others. And sympathy maxim has two aspects, including minimizing antipathy between self and others and maximizing sympathy between self and others.