对Leech礼貌原则的研究

A study of Leech's politeness principle in business

conversations

1. Introduction

1.1 research background

In recent years, pragmatics has a significant development, especially the book of “Pragmatics”of S.Levinson published in 1983 and the “Pragmatics standard”of Leech’s, which are drawn many people’s attention. “Pragmatics”systematically evaluated all kinds of theories of pragmatics till then. “Pragmatics standard”set up the new principle based on the old theory. lt is the Politenes Principle.

“Politeness Principle”isn’t set up by Leech. Before him, a lot of linguists and sociologists pay attention to the politeness phenomenon in using language. For example, a variety of languages have a proper appellation in Chinese,such as “you and you”.

In the early fifty’s, E.Gomnan put forward the “face”problem from the sociology angel. He said, in the communication process, in the every hours and moments, people are involved in the “face”problem. “Face”is one of the standards of the people’s behavior, is involved in the people’s behavior. On the one hand, people’s behavior is restrained by the face. On the other hand, we expect that the others should pay more attention to our face. “Face”is the personal sacred and private property, is the backbone of the sense of security and happiness. If we don’t protect the face, we should be regarded as “thick-skinned”. If we don’t protect the other’s face, it should be regarded as callous.

Goffman said: face work, is working with each other. Lost or not lost the

face is just in the hand of us. If we don’t want to lose the face, the most insurance way is not hurt the other people’s face. As a result, in the conversation, as usual we belittle you, rise up the others. If people raise up themselves, belittle the others, social interaction will be magic.

The book of the “Universal language” is written by P.Brown and S.Levinson in 1978.The politeness phenomenon is an article quoted by many people. They investigated the politeness phenomenon in English and indigenous language of Mexico and a native language in the south of India. They found that in the three unrelated cultures, the politeness phenomenon is very similar in using language. They thought, the politeness phenomenon in using language is not by accident, but a common phenomenon. They use the conception of “Face”of Goffman. They think people have two kinds of face, one is the positive face, for example,we would like to be praised by the others of our own character, occupation, hobbies and wearing. The other is the negative face, for example, we don’t want to be against by the others for you, property and freedom of action. Therefore, the politeness behavior can be classified two types, one is the positive politeness, just as we should meet the positive requirements of the other’s face(for example, we should praise the other’s occupation, position, achievements, appearance, children and so on),the other is the negative politeness, just as we meet the opposite requirements of the other’s face(for example, try our best to defense the others, the property and the freedom and so on).For example, the sentence “What a nice garden you’ve got” and “I know you’ve a warm-hearted person”. It is the positive politeness behavior. The sentence “I hate to trouble you like this ,but......”and “Would you forgive me if...... ”.It is the negative politeness behavior.

In addition, Brown and Levinson argue that avoiding to be outspoken in one’s face directly, as a while, we can talk the words in a fuzzy tone, let the others judge by themselves. For example, suggestion method, repeated the sentence meaning and just tell the standard instead of the brief things, This is discussed