In various expressions of being polite,different understandings of individualism in Chinese and English cultures produce each own politeness language.

It extends the concept of FTAs (face-threatening acts) into FTAs and non-FTAs, and then demonstrates that politeness language can roughly be divided into five categories as its different levels.

Differences of polite language exists because of differences between oriental historical and cultural background,geographical environment and thinking manner and those of western.

Based on a brief study of Grice s conversational implicature and Leech s polite principle,this paper explores the scale of polite language from the angle of linguistics.

People,coming from different cultural background,will have different understanding to courtesy language with the differences in moral value view,cultural custom and regulation in behavior.

So far there have appeared all kinds of verbal politeness theories, yet these theories are biased to some extent.

An introduction of the meme notion into linguistic politeness studies reveals that both language and politeness are memes and that the Chinese politeness memes mainly originated from Lùnyǔ “The Analects of Confucius” and Lǐjì “On Li”.

There exists a close inner link between linguistic politeness and transferred negation.