A Cross-cultural Pragmatic Study Of "Politeness" In Chinese And American Commercial Advertisements

With the quickening pace of economic globalization and the rapid development of Chinese economy, China takes part in international trade more and more frequently. Foreign products pour into China, and at the same time Chinese products are exported to the foreign countries substantially. Advertisement plays an important role in the promoting procedure and has become an inseparable part of people's daily life. As a product of society, advertisement transfers not only commercial information but also cultural features. Therefore, the advertisers should have a profound understanding of the cultural features of the target market, and then make the advertisements meet the customers'psychological and cultural to get the expected advertising effect. "Politeness" is one of those important elements that affect the advertising effect.As for the research on "politeness", there are many scholars who have made great contributions to the study in this field. In the western linguistic circle, Lakoff's Politeness Rules, Brown and Levinson's Face Theory (FT) and Leech's Politeness Principle (PP) are the most influential theories. However, due to different cultures in different countries, these politeness theories based on the western culture are not applicable to every culture. Therefore, according to Chinese culture and traditional etiquette, some Chinese scholars have conducted some researches on Chinese politeness and have proposed some politeness theories/rules that are suitable to Chinese culture, such as Gu Yunguo, Mao Luming, etc.This study is conducted from a cross-cultural perspective purpose of which is to find what face features are mirrored in advertisements and then examine whether these face features could reflect the cultural differences of these two countries—China and America. In this thesis, according to Ting-Toomey's face negotiation theory the face features are divided into there sets: association/dissociation face, individual/collective face and self-/other-face. This thesis also adopts Ke Hongfei's (2006) framework of eight sub-face features. The findings show that the face features applied in the advertisements generally accord with the cultural features and value system of China and America respectively.In other words, to some extent, advertisements can reflect the cultural differences and different value systems of different countries. The result of this research is expected to provide some basic date and reference for both the Chinese and American advertisers and manufacturers who want to do transnational promotion through the cross-cultural advertising. Meanwhile, this research is an interdisciplinary study which combines pragmatic study with advertising research, so it can also supply some helpful references for the scholars in these two fields.