Abstract This paper takes four frameworks for understanding linguistic politeness (Brown and Levinson, Watts, Terkourafi, Hall) and tests each on the same corpus to see whether they yield results that are useful and/or in keeping with the other information we have about the material. The corpus used consists of 661 polite requests made in letters by a single Roman author, Cicero. The results demonstrate first that politeness theories are helpful as explanatory tools even in dealing with very well-known material, and second that no one theory is best: different theories are more and less useful in answering different questions about the data. It is therefore suggested that the use of multiple frameworks will provide the best understanding of the data.

中文翻译：

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古罗马的礼貌：它可以帮助我们评估现代礼貌理论吗？

摘要本文采用四个框架来理解语言礼貌（布朗和莱文森，瓦茨，捷尔库拉菲，霍尔），并在同一个语料库上进行测试，以查看它们是否产生有用的结果和/或与我们所掌握的有关其他信息的信息保持一致材料。语料库由一个罗马作家西塞罗（Cicero）提出的661项礼貌要求组成。结果表明，礼貌理论甚至在处理非常著名的材料时也可作为解释工具，其次，没有一个理论是最好的：不同的理论在回答有关数据的不同问题时越来越有用。因此，建议使用多个框架将提供对数据的最佳理解。