Politeness Principle in Cross-Culture Communication


  •  Yongliang Huang    

Abstract

As we all know, different people hold different views about politeness. To be polite, Leech thinks you should follow “Politeness Principle” while Levinson suggests paying attention to others’ “Face Wants”. Sometimes what the Chinese people considered to be polite may not be true according to western culture. In order to adequately provide an educated answer to this heartfelt question, this paper attempts to shed light on some of the important differences on politeness between Chinese and western culture and their values.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
  • ISSN(Print): 1916-4742
  • ISSN(Online): 1916-4750
  • Started: 2008
  • Frequency: monthly

Journal Metrics

Citation Metrics (for informational purposes only; sourced from Google Scholar as of May 2026):

1. Citations (May 2026): 112462

2. h-index (May 2026): 145

3. i10-index (February 2025): 1811

*Note: Citation metrics vary significantly across indexing platforms. These figures are provided transparently and should not be used for cross-database comparisons. For methodological details, please refer to the official  Google Scholar Metrics documentation.

Contact