Politeness And Face In Chinese Culture: Perceptions Of Request Strategies

This study is an effort to examine the claim of universality in Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory by exploring politeness strategies used by Mandarin speakers in making requests. The responses of Chinese native speakers were used as a baseline to contrast with the result of Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) project.Brown and Levinson assume that all competent members of a society are concerned about their face, which they claim universal. They regard face-threatening acts (FTAs) as those acts which run contrary to the address's face. Their framework utilizes three variables: social distance, relative power and rank of imposition to assess the degree of the FTA.In this study, the data used for the analysis of strategies is collected from fieldwork in Changsha City and Zhuzhou City. Oral elicitations are from 82 interviewees, and written responses are from 170 questionnaire respondents. The process took into consideration of their three social variables in the contexts to which the subjects were asked to respond. The findings indicated that although members of our cultural share a similar repertoire of linguistic strategies for making requests with others, they applied specific linguistic devices according to their individual cultural values and unique linguistic systems. In regard to request strategy types, Mandarin speakers were more direct in comparison the results of CCSARP.The results also showed that Brown and Levinson's claims regarding universality of politeness are not completely warranted. The correlation between face-threat and choice of politeness strategies is not nearly as high as predicted. Social variables which Brown and Levinson argued can subsume all others in determing politeness were not found to be valid. In addition to these three social factors, other types of communication variables such as setting, social norms intervene in determing the relative politeness in social interaction.