The Application of Politeness Strategies in English and Chinese Movie Reviews

Abstract

As an important part of social life and interpersonal cooperation, politeness is reflected in languages. Movie review is a typical form of writing that reflects people’s application of politeness strategies consciously or unconsciously. Under the frame of the politeness strategies theory proposed by Brown and Levinson, this paper presents the differences on positive and negative politeness strategies used between English and Chinese movie reviewers. With the selected five famous movies and ten corresponding movie reviews, including five English and five Chinese reviews, the writer discusses the application of positive and negative politeness strategies. Although the difference on frequency of the application of positive and negative politeness strategies within each group is not obvious, the use of specific strategy is different between Chinese and English reviewers. This research also tries to find out the possible reasons of the differences.