THE CONCEPT OF POLITENESS IN SERBIAN AND CHINESE: A PRAGMATIC-CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of the concept of politeness in Serbian and Chinese from a pragmatic and cultural perspective. Drawing on universal models of politeness, particularly Brown and Levinson’s face theory and Leech’s pragmatic model of politeness, the study examines the extent to which these theoretical frameworks can account for different realizations of politeness in two typologically and culturally distant languages. The analysis is based on a qualitative contrastive approach and focuses on the conceptual dimensions of politeness in Serbian and Chinese, including formal linguistic strategies, normative social patterns, and cultural principles that shape communicative behavior. The findings indicate that politeness in Serbian is largely encoded through grammatical and lexical markers that signal social distance, while in Chinese it is strongly connected to the Confucian concept of li, the preservation of mianzi (face), and the broader principle of social harmony. The study highlights the limitations of universalist theories of politeness and emphasizes the importance of cultural context in the analysis of pragmatic phenomena.