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1.1 Research Background
In 1978，Brown and Levinson published a paper titled" Universals in Language Usage:Politeness Phenomena". In this paper, they launched the first discussion about politenessand face. Since then the Politeness Principle has become an important theory when somepragmatic phenomena need to be interpreted. Leech claims that the theory of politeness ofBrown and Levinson has remained the most seminal and influential starting point forcross-cultural and cross-linguistic contrastive linguistics.，，Politeness is a universal “phenomenon although it varies among different cultures to some degree. As Leech pointsout that there is no East-West divide in politeness despite cultural differences.Pragmatics is a crucial component of modem linguistics. Though it was only proposedduring the second half of the 20^^ century, its development is very rapid. Some famouslinguists like H. P. Grice, S. Levinson, G Leech, G Yule, etc. have all put forward someclassic theories about Pragmatics, among which Leech's Politeness Principle is the veryinfluential and prevailing one. In recent years，many scholars have paid more and moreattention to the genre of reviews, but mostly are on book reviews. And a lot of fruitfulresearches have been made. Many researches have been done by scholars from variouspoints of view; however, few researches have been done on movie reviews, though Shi(2010) did make a contrastive study of modality in English and Chinese film reviews. Inorder to reach a new conclusion, this investigation will be carried out from the perspectivesof the Politeness Principle and the Face Theory.In the early 1950s，E. Goffrnan proposed the concept of “face，which eternally existsaccompanying people's communication，and ‘‘face work，should be done so as not tothreaten other's face to preserve self's face. The impulse to the study of politeness inlinguistic pragmatics came from H.P. Grice's Cooperative Principles in conversation. Grice(1975) noted that in order to account for the aspects of language use, additional maximsmight be needed, such as a politeness maxim. This suggestion was taken up by Lakoff(1973, 1979), and Leech (1977，1983). They viewed politeness in terms of maxims andrules. A different approach to politeness was proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978,1987)，who derived politeness from Goffinan's (1971) notion of face. Up to now, this hasproven to be the most influential proposal and much debate was over the universality oftheir theory. There also have been a lot of studies on politeness ever since the “face theory"came up, scholars both at home and abroad have been taking great interest in this field. Atfirst, most of the studies focus on politeness in conversations, then in writing. As a matterof fact, there are already studies on politeness strategies in book reviews, advertising andbusiness correspondences. However, few researches have been done on politeness inEnglish movie reviews.Along with the fast development and prosperity of movie industry, movie reviews ariseas a special genre of writing. A movie review is a published article or essay that commentsor introduces the concerned movie. A movie review may aim to reach several purposes anddeal with various relationships, because it is a communication channel among the writer,readers and movie producers. Movie reviews alway本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。