Effects Of The Factors On Acceptability Of Face-saving Lies In Chinese:From The Perspective Of Politeness

Politeness theory gains a great deal of interests in the past thirty years. Much has been written on politeness principles and strategies for some speech acts, such as requests and rejections. However, no researches have been conducted in examining lying. Since it is a fact that people do tell lies to save their faces and saving face is also a central topic in politeness theory, the thesis aims to study the ranking of the five influential factors in the acceptability of face-saving lies using politeness theory.This thesis defines a notion of “face-saving lie” from the Chinese perspective, which refers to a lie motivated by protecting the positive face of either the liar or others. It also analyzes the effect of the factors on its acceptability as well as the reasons of this. Inspired by the politeness theory and previous researches, five factors are selected. These factors are: distance, power, ranking of imposition, self/other benefits and age. To study those factors, a questionnaire survey was adopted followed by an interview. The questionnaire consists of five pairs of ten scenarios, each of which embodies a lie. 133 students participated in the main study and 41 of them were interviewed.Results show that, the ranking of the five factors are: 1) distance, 2) age, 3) ranking of imposition, 4) self/other benefits, 5) power. Generally, participants find it more difficult to accept face-saving lies told by persons closer to them; face-saving lies told by children and old people are accepted more easily than by others; the ranking of imposition is an important factor because face-saving lies may bring discomfort and consequences to the addressees; they have greater acceptance of lies motivated to save others’ face, because being considerate is always thought to be a virtue; power, as the fifth important factor in people’s acceptability of face-saving lies, sometimes forces people to accept face-saving lies. Men and women may have diverse acceptabilities of face-saving lies of some kinds, making gender a distinctive factor. The significance of the current study and the suggestions for future researches are also discussed.