2.2 Politeness Principle (PP)
The party on behalf of universality viewpoint assumes that although politeness can bepresented differently in different cultures, the fundamental nature of it is the same, and thusthe role it plays across cultures is universal.The group that studies politeness from the culture-specific perspective (Schiffrin 1994;Wierzbicka 1985 and Gu Yueguo 1990) has re-examined these kinds of universalhypotheses and questioned their universality. They assume that conceptualization ofpoliteness differs among cultures. The party representing culture-specific perspectivesuggests that Anglo-American politeness rules such as those proposed by Lakoff, Leechand Brown & Levinson etc cannot be universally applied in explaining cross-culturalpoliteness, especially not compliant with Oriental cultures (Gu 1990).For instance, “in Lakoff's viewpoint, imposition is not a symbol of politeness, whilein Chinese context imposition can be polite in the case of invitation” (Gu 1990:251)For example, a prospective mother-in-law (hence M) invites a prospective son-in-law(hence S) to dinner with M's family. In such a case, an ideal performance ofinviting-accepting /refusing usually takes place within a single round of talk exchanges inthe West. However, in Chinese culture, the performance of invitation triggers three roundsof talk exchanges in that M tries to minimize cost to herself to show attitudinal warmth bycomplying with the generosity maxim while S makes tactful declining by giving hisobservance of M's generosity. Gu (1990) uses a general pattern to explain the number oftalk exchanges completing a successful inviting transaction.
Chapter Three The Design of My Study ............ 19
3.1 Research questions ............................ 19
3.2 Hypotheses ...................... 19
3.3 Subjects .................. 19
3.4 Procedure........ 21
Chapter Four Results and Discussion ................... 27
4.1 Respective percentages of positive and negative politeness............... 27
4.2 A combination of both strategies................. 29
Chapter Five Conclusion.................. 31
5.1 Conclusion......................... 31
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
4.1 Respective percentages of positive and negative politeness
I have taken at random 132 business letters for samples from different books forstudy. I counted the two types of politeness strategies in all the letters and calculate therespective percentage of each politeness strategy at the level of sentence. Lets take Sample3 for example.There are 5 sentences in all in the letter. Of them S1 and S2 contain positivepoliteness strategies while S3, S4 and S5 contain negative politeness strategies. It is clearthat positive politeness strategies account for 40 percent, and the negative politenessstrategies amount to 60 percent. The respective politeness strategy proportion may varywith the progression of business transaction, which is shown in Table 4.1 The table indicates see that there is a relatively small gap between the distribution ofpositive (57 percent) and negative (43 percent) strategies in letters aimed at “makingcontact”. For negotiation the perc
