Cross-cultural Context and Politeness

Abstract：In social interaction, politeness is a universal phenomenon existing in all languages. However, for social, ethnographic and even historical reasons, politeness strategies in a specific cultural context may vary from one to another. And for most time it is not language itself but different politeness strategies that lead to cross-cultural communicative failure. Knowing about these differences will help to overcome pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication.

Key words：cross-cultural context；politeness strategies；pragmatic failure

中图分类号： H319 文献标识码： A 文章编号：1672-1578（2012)05-0007-02

1 Introduction

Politeness is viewed as one of the major social constraints on human interaction which regulates participants’ communicative behavior by constantly reminding them to take into considerations the feelings of others. It is necessary to consider their feelings so as to establish levels of mutual comfort and promote rapport, which in turn accelerate and facilitate human communication in every day conversation. According to Brown and Levinson, people all over the world share a desire to be left in peace when they wish to, and to be supported when they need to. Every participant involved in interactions expects their self-esteem and public self-image to be recognized and respected by everyone else in public or private situations. This is what Brown and Levinson called “face”. There are two kinds of face: positive face and negative face. Positive face is the need to be accepted even liked, by others, to be treated as a member of the same group. Negative face is the need to be independent, to have freedom of action and not to be imposed on by others. However, in actual interaction, there are some speech acts which will infringe on the other’s need to maintain his or her self-esteem, public self-image and be respected. This is described as “face threatening act.” In order to avoid embarrassing the other person, making them feel uncomfortable, politeness strategies are developed to save the other’s face.

It is true that this politeness and face saving universally exist in all languages. And it’s also possible to specify a number of different general principles for being polite in social interaction within a particular culture, some of these might include being tactful, generous, modest and sympathetic towards others. However, politeness is a relative concept. Being polite in one country is not necessarily considered to be polite or even rude or impolite in another, therefore, when communication is conducted between two people from different cultural background, for most time, their cross-cultural communicative failure is caused not by language ability itself but their ignorance of the correct application of strategies for communicating politeness in cross-cultural context. This ignorance may be dangerous, as: “while grammatical errors may reveal a speaker to be a less proficient language user, pragmatic failure reflects badly on him or her as a person” (Thomas, 1983).