Gender Differences On The Application Of Face Strategies In Chinese And English Business Emails

On the condition of economic globalization and regional cooperation, Sino-foreign trade becomes more and more frequent with each passing day. So in order to reduce the spatial regional differences and break the economic barrier, wide use of Internet becomes steadily on the increase. Therefore, as a newly emerging communicating method, Internet plays a very important role in modern life. The wide use of Internet makes the world become much smaller. What’s more, it also narrows the distances between individuals as well. At the same time, taking business English emails as a late-model communicating channels, it has already been an absolutely necessary and indispensable communicating means in our daily life. In international transactions, business English emails are going to fulfill a more useful function. For that reason, business emails have been researched extensively by a lot of scholars and researchers in recent years. Moreover, at the present time, the researches on business English emails lay particular emphasis on linguistics and pragmatics, which remains an immense space for the researches from the perspectives of gender differences and face theories. This thesis takes gender differences and face theories as the theoretical frameworks and regards the business English emails as the analyzed text.As we all know, the cultural differences between Chinese and western are remarkable.Furthermore, face theory is one of the most important components of culture. Therefore, the different cognitive perspective and concerns between Chinese and western will lead to the misunderstandings, even the misinterpretations or misapprehensions, which may result in the failure of the trade. This thesis will make an intensive study of face theories in business English emails and bring forth some new ideas. It is in the hope that it would be a supplementation and development to present intercultural business communication study.This thesis adopts face strategies of Brown & Levinson and Scollon & Scollon as its theoretical foundation to conduct detailed research, which, by virtue of content analysis, is classified by gender differences from the perspectives of positive face and negative face,independence and involvement, serving for analyzing business emails of Chinese and western. Thus, three hypotheses have been proposed: Hypothesis 1, Chinese males tend to adopt positive face strategies and Chinese females tend to use negative face strategies;however, westerners are on the contrary. Hypothesis 2, Chinese prefer the strategies of involvement and westerners prefer the strategies of independence; males give preference to the strategies of independence, and females give preference to the strategies of involvement.Hypothesis 3, compared to Chinese females, western females are more inclined to“masculinisation” in the usage of face strategies.In order to do the analysis and prove those three hypotheses, the author collected 100 pieces of business English emails from three companies, which are all used to communicate with foreign businessmen. The components of the 100 pieces of emails are as follows: 50 pieces emails are from the Chinese companies and the rest 50 pieces are from the western companies which are looked as the response. At the same time, the female-to-male ratio accounts for 50% respectively. Finally, the result of the research proves the three hypotheses mentioned above basically. That is to say, there exist differences in using face strategies between Chinese males or females and western males and females. Chinese males pay more attention to negative face strategies, and western males have the same preference,regard negative face strategies more important. Chinese females prefer positive face strategies, and so do western females, they also focus on positive face strategies. Males tend to use the strategies of independence and females put stress upon the strategies of involvement. Especially, in western females’ business English emails, the strategies of involvement have been used frequently. While in the usage of face strategies, the differences between western males and females are not as significant as supposed. Thus it exists a “masculinisation” tendency to some extent. However, compared with western females, Chinese females have larger differences from Chinese males, which by means of it has a lower “masculinisation” tendency.