Abstract
With the rapid development of science and technology, people from different countries and cultural backgrounds are making more and more communications. Thus more and more attention has been paid to what politeness is and how to be polite in cross-cultural interactions. Otherwise misunderstanding or even breakdown may occur frequently because of the cultural differences. In order to reduce the misunderstanding in interaction and improve the communication between Chinese and English, research into politeness is in need. This paper tires make a contrastive study of politeness principle to see the difference of English and Chinese culture. On the contrast of the Address term Maxim, Modesty Maxim, Tact Maxim, and Sympathy Maxim, we could have a good insight into the differences of culture between English and Chinese.
Keywords   Politeness Principle; cultural difference; contrast between China and the west

摘  要：随着科学技术的发展，不同国家和背景的人们之间的交流也越来越频繁。使得人们在跨文化交际中越来越注重自己的礼貌行为。否则，由于文化差异而引起的误解和交际失败就会不断出现。为了避免或尽量减少在跨文化交际中的误解，加强中英人们的交流，对于礼貌的研究是必需的。因此本文就中英两位学者的礼貌准则做一个对比研究，通过称呼准则，谦虚准则，得体准则和同情准则的对比，我们可以从中清楚的看到中英文化的不同之处。
关键词   礼貌原则；文化差异；中西对比

The world, along with different nationalities, politics, economy, education, cultural art and so on between nations, contacts each other frequently day by day. How to know objectively and deal with different nationality’s different culture and eliminate the spoken language exchange barrier because of cultural difference has become the hot topic discussion worldwide. In the world, various nationalities have their unique politeness principle or criterion. So people’s contact will have misunderstanding or conflict. Therefore, various social groups following politeness principle and having something in common are worth studying and discussing to a great degree. Especially to the cross-culture communication research, it seems that it is more important to explore the difference.