A Pragmatic Study of Chinese and Western Linguistic Politeness

DOI

10.2991/icsste-15.2015.56How to use a DOI?

Keywords

linguistic politeness; Politeness Principle; cross-cultural communication

Abstract

Politeness is a social and linguistic phenomenon that exists in almost every culture. Despite its universality the interpretation and understanding of politeness, the ways to realize politeness and the standards of judgment differ in different cultures. Based on an analysis of Leech's Politeness Principle and Gu Yueguo's Politeness Principle, which can represent the Western and Chinese politeness theory model respectively, this paper intends to make a contrastive study of Chinese and Western linguistic politeness in terms of their responses towards praises and compliments , terms of address, privacy and taboo, value and modesty. We find that linguistic politeness strategy bears obvious cultural traits and is largely influenced by its culture, namely, religion, value and ethics etc. The contrastive analysis of the Chinese and Western linguistic politeness can hopefully boost cross-cultural communication.

Copyright

© 2015, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mei Wang
AU  - Yingying Peng
PY  - 2015/04
DA  - 2015/04
TI  - A Pragmatic Study of Chinese and Western Linguistic Politeness
BT  - Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Social Science and Technology Education
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 192
EP  - 197
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icsste-15.2015.56
DO  - 10.2991/icsste-15.2015.56
ID  - Wang2015/04
ER  -