This article tries to analyze and compare the courtesy principles and pragmatic differences between Chinese and English courtesy languages.

This article tries to analyze and compare the pragmatic differences between Chinese and Western courtesy languages, such as greetings, the polite languages, the congratulating languages or the apologizing ones.

This thesis is an attempt to make a contrastive study of courtesy language in English and Chinese.

The success of communication and the development of society partly depend on the proper use of politeness formulae, which, as a kind of lubricant, play an irreplaceable role in society.

Nowadays, with the advent of the“global village”, the cross-cultural contact between the East and West is getting more and more frequent and the appropriate use of politeness formulae plays a key role in smoothing the communications.

However,it is not always true that polite expressions can reflect the respectable,close relations among people.

As a universal phenomenon, politeness plays a key role in establishing and maintaining social harmony, and prescribing individuals’linguistic behavior.

This paper aims at a comparative study on politeness in English and Korean in cross-cultural communication.

Based on the English and Chinese Politeness Principle, this paper makes a contrastive analysis of the difference of English and Chinese polite language and gives examples to illustrate it.

The polite languages of English and Chinese basically correspond ecch other semanticaly, but rather incongruously pragmatically.

The analysis of Value difference between English and Chinese cultures in politeness pragmatics will help people to pay enough attention to other s politeness phenomina when Communicating of their languages are quite different.