A Comparative Analysis Of Politeness Strategies Employed In English And Chinese Prefaces

Preface, as a constant genre of written discourses, aims to make an introduction to the content and object of a book, or make comments on the book. In recent years, it has been studied from different perspectives such as systemic and functional linguistics, narratology and discourse analysis. However, other areas should be of equal importance to draw our attention, such as pragmatics. On the basis of Brown and Levinson’s face theory, the thesis selects30English and30Chinese prefaces in books published in recent five years respectively, all of which are written by other scholars instead of the book authors themselves. By examining each kind of positive politeness strategies (PPSs) and negative politeness strategies (NPSs) to the book authors and the readers in the data corpus, the thesis author makes a comparison between the frequency and preference in the use of politeness strategies employed in English and Chinese prefaces. The result indicates that, on one hand, most politeness strategies employed in English and Chinese prefaces are the same, and both of the English and Chinese preface writers prefer to use PPSs. Moreover, more politeness strategies are used to save the book authors’face than the readers’ face. On the other hand, the frequency of positive politeness strategy (PPS)"commendatory terms" in Chinese prefaces is higher than that in English prefaces. English preface writers are prone to use "pointing out the books’ merits" to satisfy the readers’positive face, while Chinese preface writers are likely to use the plural pronoun "we" to include the participants into an activity. The negative politeness strategy (NPS)"minimizing the imposition" appears more in Chinese prefaces than that in English prefaces.This paper has tried to make an analysis of the reasons of similarities and differences in the use of politeness strategies in English and Chinese prefaces from the cultural perspective. It reached a conclusion that the universality of politeness and the purpose of prefaces account for the similarities, and the differences are caused by the concept of face, value systems, contexts, and publication situations in China and Western countries.Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are applied in the thesis, and in order to make the statistics clearer, Tables and Bar Graph are used to present the data collected and analyzed. The study proves the effectiveness of face theory in written discourses under various cultural contexts. Moreover, it offers some help to the preface writing practice, providing a new perspective to linguistic study of prefaces, whether in English or Chinese.