Reconstructing the Politeness Principle in Chinese: A response to Gu’s approach

Abstract Back in the early 1990s, Gu Yueguo formulated the Politeness Principle and its maxims to explain Chinese politeness phenomena, as a counter reaction to Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, which claims that politeness is a universal phenomenon in language usage. Despite the fact that Gu’s illustration of politeness phenomena in Chinese has attracted considerable attention from pragmaticians, this paper points out that there are at least three major issues in his study: failure to provide a generalized high-level definition of politeness, improper construction of some of the maxims, and inadequate adoption of Leech’s theoretical framework for analysis of Chinese data. With the increasing call for culture-specific research on im/politeness, it is of great necessity to rethink these issues regarding Chinese politeness phenomena. Therefore, this paper attempts to reconstruct the Politeness Principle in Chinese by reexamining and clarifying Gu’s approach. It argues that politeness can be defined as appropriate behavior in social interaction. Based on this definition, the Politeness Principle and four maxims of Modesty, Respectfulness, Friendliness, and Refinement are coherently reconstructed in a clarified and refined form. The reconstruction demonstrates that polite behavior in Chinese is exhibited in an appropriate or acceptable way in accordance with these maxims as social norms or regularities.