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... hange's of political situations in the country of China. A very important year to mention is 1949 when the communist regime gained political power. Before this year, Lee-Wong (2000: 156 - 158) notes that the Chinese word xiao jie / "little miss" was a form representing elitism, wealth and high status. After the year of the Revolution, when class distinctions were abolished, this form was dropped.
Still, xiao jie was being brought back into existence by means of modernization movements. Today xiao jie is the rough equivalent of English 'Miss'. The term taiwan represents a form of addressing a Chinese female as well, but it is disliked by them, especially by working professionals, since taiwan refers to situations that were common before 1949 when women in the upper class stayed home and were economically dependent. A quite neutral form of address in Chinese would be the term tong zhi. It is used whenever the hearer's occupation or title is unknown, or when a stranger is addressed.
So tong zhi is not used to diminish the hearer's power, but it is used to mark social distance. For rather informal situations Chinese speakers tend to use the word shift. According to Lee-Wong (2000: 182) this term "is used in situations which signal informality, particularly in places like the market as opposed to a restaurant, which shows the highest frequency in the use of xiao jie as a term of address to waitresses." Nevertheless, the term xiao jie is still limited as a public address form. The absence of Chinese address forms will be clearly noticed. In other words, they are a common form of linguistic etiquette expressing politeness on the level of face-to-face communication. Unlike in English and some languages spoken in Europe, age comes before rank.
So a boss who is 40 years old would still use more forms of respect than the person opposite if he was in a conversation with an employee older than him. On the other side, informality does not have any components to respect, but to familiarity and friendliness as between social equals. This social closeness is not necessarily expressed by first names, so it is not unusual to use the full name even when people are closely related to each other (e. g. a parent addressing her daughter or a husband addressing her wife). Looking at informality from a different point of view, it emphasizes in-groupies, meaning the more a person is integrated in a social group, the more appropriate it is to use less formal forms of address. 5. 2.
Forms of address in English Unlike in Chinese language, English speakers often avoid a specific form of address. Especially in situations where the relationship between the speaker and the listener is not clear enough, a direct form of address (e. g. you, Mr. Edwards, Sir, Thomas etc. ) is avoided. Even though English does not differentiate between forms like 'vous' / 'tu' (French) or 'Sie' / 'du' (German), the 'no-name option's eem's to provide a way out of the difficulty.
As Montgomery notes (1995: 111), "linguistic choices may be used to establish, shift, negotiate and manipulate the nature of the relationship." Nevertheless, the two most frequent forms of address in English are first name or title plus last name, depending on the situation of communication. The form title plus last name is considered to be rather formal, whereas calling somebody by his or her first name indicates informality and therefore a friendly attitude of the speaker. According to Montgomery (1995: 111), there exist a number of settings where explicit instructions concerning how key participants should be addressed, are given. As an example he quotes a dialogue spoken in front of a British law court, where judges are supposed to be addressed by the term 'my lord'. Another example would be the President of the United States who is supposed to be addressed as 'Mr.
President' whenever he answers questions at a press conference in the White House. 6. Chinese: Politeness across social groups What is very important to mention is the fact that there exist decisive regional differences in terms of politeness in Chinese. People living in the north of the country (e. g. Beijing) tend to see politeness as a sign for solidarity.
Therefore they do not consider the use of im positives as impolite, especially when the speaker and the listener are socially not very distant. On the contrary, people who live in the southern part of China tend to use indirect requests as an act of politeness, and they consider im positives as something rather impolite. This phenomenon can be explained by the fact that a speaker from the city of Beijing would emphasize high social power. So if he or she is confronted with a situation where both social power and social rank play important roles, social power is seen to legitimate the use of im positives. "Still, " Lee-Wong (2000: 304) notes, "all regional groups accept im positives as appropriate in situations marked by high power. " Why many speakers of Chinese tend to use less im positive structures and prefer the use of non-im positives can probably be explained by the influence from Western countries.
According to Lee-Wong's statistical evidence, older respondents (40 to 60 years of age) tend to use bald on-record strategies more often than the younger age group (20 to 29 years of age). This is an indication for the influence of contact with English as a second language. As Lee-Wong puts it: "[... ] Chinese speakers who have been speaking English as a second language for a greater length of time generally prefer to adopt a negative politeness strategy rather than a positive politeness strategy. " (Lee-Wong 2000: 304) 7. Conclusion This paper has mentioned and briefly explained various theories on politeness. Of course there are many more to mention, but the theories mentioned here have been very important for literature dealing with the phenomenon of politeness. In this general approach it was mentioned that Chinese language can only be investigated by looking at its history and the political development of China simultaneously.
Especially by explaining the concept of limit it becomes clear that language cannot be separated from its culture and people. Traditions have to be taken in account as well as historical events and dictatorships. Moreover, the present situation and changes in language are equally important compared to the past. Through the discussion of request strategies it has become obvious that Chinese have a different understandings concerning politeness, even among themselves. Therefore any study on cross-cultural communication would fail if the researcher did not consider regional differences. Countries consist of cultures, and cultures consist of subcultures, and subcultures consist of individuals.
Therefore all these levels of communication have to be taken into consideration in order to be successful in analysing this area. As this paper and many other works and studies on cross-cultural communication shows, contextual meaning plays a very important part when talking about differences in languages. "The study of any language spoken by a people who live under conditions different from our own and possess a different culture must be carried out in conjunction with a study of their culture and of their environment. " (Lee-Wong 2000: 317) Without the consideration of contextual meaning it becomes hard to interpret the use of bald on-record request strategies in Chinese as an act of showing politeness. In order to sum up the understanding of 'politeness' in Chinese by simple words: it is expressed by showing respect and being explicit. Since cultures of Western societies put emphasis on negative politeness, a cultural and communication gap arises. The only way to close this gap is to show up and teach pragmatic knowledge as an essential component of a second language. Hence, learning vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language in order to understand it and being able to communicate with native speakers of this language is important, but it is even more important to accept - and therefore understand - differences in our cultures.
In fact, aspects of different languages are very hard and difficult to analyse since there exist differences that can not be compared easily. Lee-Wong, who did a great study on politeness and face in Chinese culture, and therefore was great help and an important source for this paper, concludes as follows: "Western politeness, driver by the perceived need to avoid imposition, tends to formulate requests using a H-oriented perspective, exploiting indirectness, saying 'p' to convey 'q'. From the Western speakers' viewpoint, there is considerable cultural value attached to the maintenance of physical and mental space - that of non-infringement regardless of who the interact ants are. From the Chinese speakers' viewpoint, ethical issues of sincerity and demonstration of respect and deference occupy just as important a place, if not more important.
The notion of a face threatening act (FTA) therefore needs redefinition. " (Lee-Wong 2000: 310) As mentioned in the introduction of this paper, there exist many more very interesting aspects of politeness that could not be dealt with in this text. For example, politeness in combination with gender differences would be a topic that certainly would reveal interesting information. Still, one of the reasons why it is not possible to discuss more than just a few aspects here is that behaviour in communication is closely linked to many sciences as psychology, biology, geography, and of course philosophy. Therefore the only possibility to scratch on the surface of the issue of politeness is to give a basic introduction combined with useful sources readers can consult if they would like to. It has to be admitted that the important question whether the Chinese or the English are more polite, could not be answered in this paper. But it questioned the question itself, since politeness cannot be compared easily (as discussed above) and due to this I would hesitate to claim that there is an objective verification for the view that one nation is more polite than the other.
References Brown, Penelope; Levinson, Stephen C. 1987. Politeness - some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gu, Yueguo. 1990. "Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese." Journal of Pragmatics 14, 237 - 257. Lee-Wong, Song M. 2000. Politeness and face in Chinese culture.
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics - Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mehrabian, Albert. 1971.
Silent messages. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Montgomery, Michael. 1995. An Introduction to Language and Society. London: Routledge.
Watts, Richard. 1992. Politeness in Language: Studies in its history, theory and practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Yule, George. 1996.
Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Research essay sample on Politeness A Comparison Between Chinese And English
