Chinese And Western Face Cultural Pragmatic Strategies For Analysis

As a complex social psychological phenomenon, the importance of face receives widespread attention, because it plays a decisive role for the success of cross-cultural communication. The differences between Chinese and Western Face Culture lead to the widely divergence of pragmatic strategies. The Chinese people appreciate collectivism, and emphasize proper ways of life and status that everybody has in community. So the Chinese face culture features as"positive face", or we can say Chinese culture respects relatively"involvement"face strategy. Comparatively speaking, American people pay much attention to"freedom"and"individualism". Influeced by this concept, they focus on"negative face", thus they are inclined to use"independence"face strategy. This thesis mainly discusses the differences between Chinese and Western face culture, and their respective pragmatic strategies, which could help people avoid pragmatic errors in the process of cross-culture communication, then improve communicator's communicative competence.