摘要

礼貌是一种普遍的社会现象，广泛地存在于人类社会生活之中。随着中国与西方国家在政治、经济、文化方面的联系变得越来越紧密，社交越来越频繁，礼貌用语也显得越来越重要。如果不了解中西方文化的差异，必然导致交际障碍，引起误解。本文主要从跨文化角度对中西方的称呼语、问候语、祝贺语、感谢语以及致歉语进行分析比较，深入研究这些差异存在的原因，以减少文化交际过程中的误解与冲突，使说话者成功地进行跨文化交际。本文所指的“西方”主要指以英语文化为代表的欧美民族。

关键词：对比研究；礼貌用语；跨文化

Abstract

Politeness is a social phenomenon and widely used in people’s social life. With the increasing contact of politics, economy and culture between China and foreign countries, courtesy language becomes more and more important. If people do not understand the similarities and the differences of the courtesy language between two countries, misunderstanding in interaction will occur. This thesis analyzes the differences in terms of address, greetings, blessings, appreciation and apologizes to make a contrastive study of courtesy language in Chinese and English from the perspective of cross- culture, and explores the cause of these differences, aiming at reducing misunderstanding and cultural conflict and promoting successful communication in process of cross-cultural communication. “Western” in this paper mainly refers to the Occident influenced by English culture.

Key words: contrastive study; courtesy language; cross-culture

1.    Introduction
1.1 The Cross-cultural Perspective
In recent years, many researchers study language from different angles such as grammatical, pragmatic, value and cultural etc. Contrastive study is considered to be an effective method of language study. Its purpose is to find out the similarities and differences between two different languages to reduce communicational obstacle.
As we all know politeness is a common phenomenon that exists in all kinds of cultures, which can coordinate human relations in society and interactive activity. The success and effect of verbal communication depends on whether people can choose the appropriate polite forms of expression. Courtesy language can help people communicate smoothly, which is closely related with and inseparable from social custom. Based on the cultural differences between China and Western countries, the author attends to adopt the contrastive perspective to introduce the English and Chinese polite language.