ABSTRACT:Politeness is necessary in making a successful communication and language misunderstanding will make communication failed. Therefore, people should obey the politeness principles to avoid language misunderstanding and conduct successful communication. As one of politeness languages, there are lots of differences to make communication failed between Chinese and American compliments. In order to make a better cross-cultural communication, the Politeness Theories from Leech and Gu Yueguo will be adopted in this paper as the basic theoretical framework. They will be used to discuss and reveal the cultural differences between Chinese and American compliments on target, topics and responding. Meanwhile, according to the theories, some communicative suggestions will be put forward, which aim to enlighten English learners to avoid pragmatics mistakes as much as possible during their cross-cultural communications.

Keywords: compliment; cultural differences; the Politeness Theory

TABLE OF CONTENTS

摘要

ABSTRACT

1 INTRODUCTION-1

2 LITERATURE REVIEW ON COMPLIMENT-2

2.1 A Brief Introduction to Compliment-2

2.2 Literature Review on Compliments-3

2.2.1 Overseas research on compliments-4

2.2.2 Domestic research on compliments-4

2.3 A Brief Introduction to the Politeness Theory-5

2.3.1 The Politeness Theory from Leech-6

2.3.2 The Politeness Theory from Gu Yueguo-8

3CULTURAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CHINESE AND AMERICAN COMPLIMENTS-10

3.1 Common Points in Both Compliments-10

3.2 Different Points in Both Compliments-11

3.2.1  On compliments between Chinese and Americans-11

3.2.2  On compliment responding between Chinese and Americans-15

3.3 Summary-17

4 THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CHINESE AND ENGLISH COMPLIMENTS AND SUGGESTIONS-19

4.1 The Causes of Differences between Chinese and American compliments-19

4.1.1 The different value systems-19

4.1.2 The different Social backgrounds-20

4.2 Suggestions on Dealing with the Differences between Chinese and American Compliments-21

4.2.1 Complimenting suggestions for Chinese and Americans-21

4.2.2 Responding suggestions for Chinese and Americans-22

5 CONCLUSION-24

REFERENCES-26

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS-27