A Contrastive Study Of Politeness Strategies In Chinese And English Prefaces

Brown and Levinson's face theory claims that every individual has 'face'?one's public self-image or esteem, which is divided into two aspects: positive one and negative one. Some speech acts in interaction threaten interactants' face and are thus called face-threatening acts (FTAs). Strategies used to soften the FTAs are called politeness strategies. According to face theory, the preface of a book and many speech acts in the preface are FTAs threatening experts and colleagues' (E&C's) face and general readers' (GR's) face. Based on face theory, this thesis studies the use of politeness strategies in 50 Chinese prefaces and 50 English ones by means of a qualitative research and a quantitative research. The qualitative research reveals that many politeness strategies presented in face theory are used in both Chinese and English prefaces and the politeness strategies used in these two types of prefaces are quite similar as a whole. The quantitative research shows that there exist great differences between the frequency of most of the politeness strategies in Chinese and English prefaces. It is found that the politeness strategy 'giving deference' to E&C is much more frequently used in Chinese prefaces than in English ones; The politeness strategies used to comment on E&C's works, to compare their books with E&C's, to talk about the necessity of writing their books and to describe the characteristics of their books are less frequently used in Chinese prefaces than in English ones; Chinese authors are more likely to shorten the distance between E&C and themselves but less likely to shorten that between GR and themselves than English authors by politeness strategies; Chinese authors tend to describe the value of their books indirectly while English authors tend to describe the merits of their books directly. The thesis explains the differences from the cultural point of view and argues that the differences mainly arise from the differences between Chinese and English cultures in such factors as concepts of politeness, people's attitudes to others' views, social structures, personality, psychology and value orientation, and education and publication systems.