Abstract:Interest in courtesy both as social and linguistic phenomenon has been significant in the last three decades of the 20th century. As any other sociolinguistic theory, courtesy theory should cover two aspects, namely, the individual and the group. Social indexing has great influences on people’s courtesy strategy choice in different culture. Because of culture value differences, people of different countries observe different courtesy principles. For Western and Chinese cultures, similarities lie in the fact that people in both cultures tend to be polite to each other by being considerate and indirect. The differences mainly lie in the approach to expressing courtesy beliefs. Study of this paper is based on individual autonomy and social identity of courtesy. The discussion is directed to a comparative study on the difference of courtesy strategies adopted by English-speaking people and Chinese people, to find a resolution to culture value differences between Westerners and Chinese, and to point out its implication to cross-culture communication.

Key words: Courtesy; western; Chinese; comparison