【Abstract】In daily life, everyone has to communicate with the medium of language. How to communicate effectively is a question bothering each of us through our lifetime. This thesis analyzes the situations of communication between Chinese people and foreigners from the perceptive of Levinson’s face theory and Gu Yueguo’s theory about politeness in Chinese culture in order to further find out the different cultural characteristics of communication in China and the West.
　　【Key words】communicate; impoliteness; face theory; culture
　　1. Introduction
　　As a social phenomenon, politeness has been paid much attention to. Many researches based on politeness were made from sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, ethics, culturology and many other aspects. From the beginning of the 1970s, researchers focus on politeness on our daily life. In the cross-culture communication, people from different cultural backgrounds may have different feelings about each others’ words, which is likely to cause impoliteness. How to communicate effectively between people from different culture backgrounds to avoid impoliteness is a question that needs us to solve. To solve this problem, the key point is the cognition of politeness.
　　2. Literature Review
　　In the early 1950 s, Brown and Levinson (1978) established their theory system based on Goffman’s politeness theory. From their point of view, “face” is an emotional investment, and it can be lost, maintained and strengthened in the communication between people. Therefore, face is the public self-image, as everyone wants to be acknowledged by others. (Brown