A Comparative Study of Lexical Techniques in Honorific and Humble expressions in Chinese and Persian

politeness is an inseparable concept of human communication and its linguistic representation depends on the structure of linguistic societies and the patterns of social behavior in those societies. This article deals with the concept of politeness in Persian and Chinese languages and the study of linguistic techniques for expressing politeness in honorific and humble expressions in these languages. Pronouns, address titles, noun groups, and verb groups have been studied to examine the indicators of honorifics and humility. In Chinese, honorific and humble expressions are the constructions of compound nouns and compound verbs using honorific adjectival or self-depreciatory morphemes. These adjectival morphemes are added to nouns and verbs in the form of prefixes, forming honorific or humble compound constructions. Therefore, the representation of politeness in Chinese works at the morphological level and in Persian at the syntactic level. In the Persian language, speakers express their politeness by using the expansion of noun and verb groups by adding adjectives and honorific and self-depreciatory adverbs. Also, in the Persian language, some verbs have three types: Honorific, neutral, and self-depreciatory. The analysis of the address titles indicates a significant difference between the two languages. While the honorific and humble expressions in the Chinese language are much more common and widespread than in the Persian language, in the Persian language, the speaker does not use any humble phrases in any context for the elders and superiors, as well as for his country, city, and homeland, while in the Chinese language, humble expressions are also common for older people, the speaker's country, and city.