礼貌普遍存在于人类社会文化中,但对礼貌的定义还存在争议。本文主要回顾了关于礼貌定义的几个主要观点,并得出了区别于前人的观点:礼貌是一个内容和形式统一的复杂体系,它包含潜在礼貌和现实礼貌两个方面。同时本文还从语义和形式上区分了语言礼貌和言语礼节。 Politeness is prevalent in human social cultures, but there is controversy over the definition of politeness. This paper mainly reviews several major views on the definition of politeness and draws a different from the previous point of view: politeness is a complicated system of content and form of unity, which contains the two aspects of potential courtesy and politeness. At the same time, this essay also differentiates the language politeness and speech etiquette both semantically and formally.