A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Personal Advertisements-A Cultural Perspective

Personal advertisements mean that females and males try to find their spouses through the ads, which is the channel to show people's outlook of marriage. Because the process of mate selection is concerned with comprehensive social factors, the personal ads are regarded as a barometer in terms of social culture and value orientation. This study is helpful for people to know the differences on mate selection between Chinese and English. What's more, it offers some related research results to sociolinguistics and socio- culture.This thesis makes an analysis of personal ads with the purpose of finding the cultural contrasts in Chinese and English. It adopts the random sampling to draw out 320 personal ads of unmarried Chinese and English ranging in age from 20 to 40 as the corpus. The author uses style analysis as the main route, supplemented by quantitive analysis to illustrate the contents in personal ads. The contents of personal ads are classified into physiological conditions (appearance, age), material conditions (work, economic conditions, educational background), and spiritual life conditions (interests, individual characters, moral characters). According to the style analysis and data results, the author employs cultural theories constituted by Hofstede's three cultural dimensions, Brown and Levinson's face-saving theory, Hall's high-/low-context communication, Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's time orientations to find out the six typical contrasts in two cultural values, namely, collectivism vs. individualism, stability vs. change, male dominant culture vs. equality culture, positive face vs. negative face, fuzziness thinking vs. accuracy thinking, conservative principle vs. open-minded principle.Concretely, collectivism vs. individualism reflect that Chinese value the whole family's interests while English pay attention to the individual's happiness; stability vs. change show that Chinese culture is a stable culture while English culture is a changeable culture; male dominant culture vs. equality culture reveal that China is a male-oriented society while England is an equal society; positive face vs. negative face convey that Chinese pursue the active self-image while English seek for the passive self-image; fuzziness thinking vs. accuracy thinking express that Chinese have ambiguous ideas while English own straightforward ideas; conservative principle vs. open-minded principle explain that Chinese culture is a conservative culture while English culture is an open-minded culture.