On the Difference between the Principle of Politeness and the Principle of Appropriateness

The question whether the principle of politeness should be superior to the principle of appropriateness or vice versa confuses people for a long time. The paper discusses the difference between the principle of politeness and the principle of appropriateness from different aspects, and concludes that they belong to different pragmatic levels. The principle of politeness is the maximum principle in pragmatics, while the principle of appropriateness is the maximum principle in rhetoric. Meanwhile it also points out that the reason why people are confused with the two concepts lies in two aspect: surface and deep. The surface one is that people explain them only from their literal meaning , the deep, basic one is that people are confused with the boundaries of the two subjects: pragmatics and rhetoric.