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Reconstructing the Politeness Principle in Chinese: A response to Gu’s approach

  • Ling Zhou

    Zhou Ling (Ph.D) is an Associate Professor who currently teaches in the School of Foreign Languages at Northeast Normal University. Her research interest is in intercultural pragmatic studies. She focuses on face and (im)politeness, aiming at analyzing and explaining the similarities and differences between Chinese and English cultures. E-mail: vivianzhou80@163.com

    and Shaojie Zhang

    Zhang Shaojie (Ph.D) is Senior Professor of Linguistics in the School of Foreign Languages at Northeast Normal University. His research interest is in linguistic pragmatics. E-mail: zhangsj10@163.com

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Published/Copyright: November 30, 2018
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Abstract

Back in the early 1990s, Gu Yueguo formulated the Politeness Principle and its maxims to explain Chinese politeness phenomena, as a counter reaction to Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, which claims that politeness is a universal phenomenon in language usage. Despite the fact that Gu’s illustration of politeness phenomena in Chinese has attracted considerable attention from pragmaticians, this paper points out that there are at least three major issues in his study: failure to provide a generalized high-level definition of politeness, improper construction of some of the maxims, and inadequate adoption of Leech’s theoretical framework for analysis of Chinese data. With the increasing call for culture-specific research on im/politeness, it is of great necessity to rethink these issues regarding Chinese politeness phenomena. Therefore, this paper attempts to reconstruct the Politeness Principle in Chinese by reexamining and clarifying Gu’s approach. It argues that politeness can be defined as appropriate behavior in social interaction. Based on this definition, the Politeness Principle and four maxims of Modesty, Respectfulness, Friendliness, and Refinement are coherently reconstructed in a clarified and refined form. The reconstruction demonstrates that polite behavior in Chinese is exhibited in an appropriate or acceptable way in accordance with these maxims as social norms or regularities.


Here, Chinese, called Putonghua, refers to a general standardized language spoken by all Chinese people.


About the authors

Ling Zhou

Zhou Ling (Ph.D) is an Associate Professor who currently teaches in the School of Foreign Languages at Northeast Normal University. Her research interest is in intercultural pragmatic studies. She focuses on face and (im)politeness, aiming at analyzing and explaining the similarities and differences between Chinese and English cultures. E-mail: vivianzhou80@163.com

Shaojie Zhang

Zhang Shaojie (Ph.D) is Senior Professor of Linguistics in the School of Foreign Languages at Northeast Normal University. His research interest is in linguistic pragmatics. E-mail: zhangsj10@163.com

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere thanks to Richel Benham and Professor Kádár for their proofreading the paper. Our thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers whose valuable comments and suggestions improved the paper very considerably. Without their illuminating help, this paper would hardly have appeared in its present form. This study is supported by the grant (16BYY179) from National Funds for Social Sciences for research on “A corpus-based semantics-pragmatics interface study of mianzi and lian in their conceptual representations”.

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Published Online: 2018-11-30
Published in Print: 2018-11-27

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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