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Among all the factors, face is a fundamental one. It is no longer a tangible physical feature but a concept with more inherent meanings. Lin Yutang reputed in My Country and My People that “face cannot be translated or defined. It is like honor and is not honor. It cannot be purchased with money, and gives a man or a woman a material pride. It is hollow and is what men fight for and what many women die for. It is invisible and yet by definition exists by being shown to the public” (1977:190-191). Lu Xun also claimed that although the term of face seemed familiar, one may get perplexed when trying to interpret it clearly (1934).
Actually, the foundation of the theories of Chinese people’s face perspective is a result of communication between the west and the east. Both western and eastern scholars thought that the face perspective of Chinese is a psychological feature of Chinese, which was criticized as superficial nowadays. And in 20th century Chinese scholars focused more on criticizing Chinese people’s face perspective without in-depth knowledge.
Chinese think highly of face work and do their utmost to prevent from losing face. They use strategies including verbal and nonverbal to save their own face and others’ face. For instance, they usually present a suggestion euphemistically rather than directly for the sake of protecting others’ face. Compared with Chinese, westerners hold intensely different views on face. They may not as euphemistical as Chinese and conversely, under more circumstances, they express what they think directly. Such behaviors may give the impression of impoliteness. That is to say, cultural shock is unavoidable and misunderstanding may occur if they know little about their counterpart’s face perspective.
Therefore, the key point is to understand your counterpart’s face perspective in any situation. Up to now, different scholars from different countries have formed various definitions of face. The theories, categories, functions of face and so forth are main points of interest, and simultaneously, the contrastive analysis including cultural significance between Chinese and Western is also adopted to interpret this term.
This paper aims to make an analysis of Chinese people’s face perspectives and have a comparison with western cultures. The big difference between Chinese and western face and facework might result in the failure of intercultural communication if it is not properly handled. The focuses are mainly on as followed: What
2. Definition of Face Perspective
As a typical concept in intercultural communication, face plays a role of crucial importance and has more inherent meanings rather than a tangible physical feature. Up to now, much significant and outstanding research work has been done from different dimensions on face. This chapter aims to comb the research outcomes about the definition of face presented by scholars from home and abroad.
2.1 Western Researches on Face
Goffman (1955) conceptualized face perspective as something that is diffusedly located in the flow of events. According to Goffman, face is defined as a kind of positive social value one person pursues in social interaction, which is also known as the positive image of self that inpiduals have when interacting with others.
Brown and Levinson (1978:66) presented the theory in Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomena based on Goffman. According to Brown and Levinson, they find different people from different language backgrounds use courteous expressions in universal. They consider face as the public self-image that every member of a society wants to claim for himself / herself. Face is a social image that inpiduals would like to preserve for themselves. H.P. Grice presented Cooperative Principle in 1975, which reveals how people follow four principles of quantity, quality, relation and manner to cooperate with each other in order to smoothly communicate, which can make the faces of each member of a society kept. However, under most circumstances, people do not follow the principles well. For understanding the communication, Brown and Levinson (1987) gave a statement in detail about politeness and face perspective systematically, including three fundamental concepts: Face, Face-threatening Acts, Face-saving Theory. They assume a person who interacts with others is a Model Person. They believe every model person is a reasonable person who has the need of face. And the face every social member wants is actually the public self-image he or she strives for in the public. It is pided into two kinds: negative face and positive face.