8 - In Comparison with English: An East-West Divide?

Summary

Chen compares Chinese politeness with English politeness in this chapter, focusing on what has been called a “East-West Divide” debate. To advance the position that East and West are fundamentally different, the author argues that Chinese politeness has its own characteristics but not unique; that the speech act of request in Chinese is conducted under similar principles and are subjected to similar constraints as seen English; that persistence in benefit offering occurs in English, too; that speech acts that are assumed to carry high levels of face threat (e.g., criticizing and disagreeing) also offers evidence that there is no East-West Divide in politeness; and that – finally – even the drastic differences in the speech act of lying between English and Chinese can be shown to be motivated by similar considerations. Culture differences are often times differences on the surface: the different symptoms of similar underlying principles. With a set of principles on which cultures may converge and a set of parameters on which cultures are likely to vary, Chen believes that B&L-E meets the challenge of being a universal theory that captures the commonalities between cultures, commonalities that transcend, and therefore account for, differences.