A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Study Of Politeness Principles In Chinese And American Advertisements

Applying a model of politeness derived from an interlocking of Brown and Levinson's theories, this paper studies the politeness strategies of comparable Chinese and American advertisements. The author uses negative versus positive face value, individual versus social face value, and self- versus other face value, and their combined features to analyze the samples of Chinese and American advertisements.Through coding of strategies according to these features in 70 advertisements, it is shown that Chinese advertisers use more"collective-face"and"negative-face"strategies, which correlate with collectivistic, vertical and high-context cultures, while the American advertisers use more"individual-face"and"positive-face"strategies, which correlate with individualistic, horizontal, low-context cultures. Besides, Chinese advertisements use more"self-face"strategy while American advertisements use more"other-face"strategy. It may be because of the use of"negative-face"strategy which stresses on being indirect in Chinese advertisements. In the combined features, Chinese advertisements mainly use Association/Collective/Other face-concern; often use Dissociation/Individual/Self face-concern and Dissociation/Collective/Self face-concern; sometimes use Dissociation/Individual/Other face-concern and Association/Collective/Self face-concern; seldom use Dissociation/Collective/Other face-concern and Association/Individual/Self face-concern; do not use Association/Individual/Other face-concern in the research, while American advertisements mainly use Association/Individual/Other face-concern; often use Association/Individual/Self face-concern; sometimes use Association/Collective/Other face-concern and Association/Collective/Self face-concern; seldom use Dissociation/Individual/Other...