A Comparative Study On Politeness Strategies In Chinese And American Sales Promotion Ads Of Consumer Goods

In recent years, there has been an enormous upsurge of interest in the study of advertising language, and the politeness phenomenon in advertising texts has gradually gained attention. More and more Chinese scholars began to focus on the politeness in various kinds of advertising texts, and they applied different theories to analyze it. However, studies on politeness in advertisements by using Brown and Levinson's face theory are relatively few and not systematic. Therefore, this paper tries to study the politeness strategies used in Chinese and American sales promotion advertisements of consumer goods by means of applying Brown and Levinson's face theory.The paper is designed to answer three questions: (1) what kinds of FTAs do sales promotion advertisements contain? (2) How are the FTAs redressed with politeness strategies? (3) How frequent are the four politeness strategies used in Chinese and American sales promotion advertisements of consumer goods?By adopting the face theory as the theoretical framework, the author identified and discussed major kinds of FTAs in sales promotion ads, and conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the politeness strategies that are used in Chinese and American sales promotion ads of consumer goods. The corpus in the present study is 100 Chinese and 100 American sales promotion ads of consumer goods of famous brands and these ads were collected from the internet.After the analysis of the corpus, it is found that sales promotion ads mainly contain three kinds of FTAs, namely, offers/promises, requests/suggestions and boasts. These FTAs are redressed with various politeness strategies. Generally speaking, advertisers use bald on record strategy to indicate that the FTAs which they have done are primarily for consumers'benefit. Positive politeness is used to shorten the distance between consumers and advertisers, to convey their cooperation and to fulfill consumers'positive face want. Advertisers use negative politeness to show respect and deference to consumers and to satisfy consumers'negative face want. Off record is a tactical way to do FTAs. Instead of doing FTAs baldly, advertisers give hints and association clues and let consumers infer advertisers'real intention. According to the statistical results, in both Chinese and American sales promotion ads, the most frequently used politeness strategy is bald on record. Positive politeness is the second most frequently used one. Off record ranks the third and negative politeness is used least frequently. The major difference between Chinese and American sales promotion ads concerning politeness strategies is that Chinese ads employ bald on record less frequently, but negative politeness and off record more frequently than American ads. Specifically speaking, advertisers adopt different politeness strategy patterns to redress different kinds of FTAs.The findings give some hints to Chinese copywriters in composing advertising texts in English. Copywriters should know how to employ the various politeness strategies to enhance the advertising effect, and how to overcome the cultural differences to produce good English advertisements.The paper enriches the studies on politeness in advertisements. The corpus in the paper is sales promotion advertisements, which have many special features and have not been explored so far. In the paper the major kinds of FTAs in sales promotion advertising texts have been identified. Besides, the comparison between Chinese and American sales promotion advertisements contributes to cross-cultural communication studies.