Gender Differences In Compliment Behavior

Of all the speech acts studied by foreign researchers in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, few can have received more widespread attention in the past 20 years than compliments. Among the large amount of research on compliments, however, only a few take into account the influence of gender, which has been proved to be an important social variable. These researchers found that men and women do differ in the ways they use compliments and the ways they respond to compliments. What's the case in China? How does the factor of gender affect compliment behavior? This paper aims at investigating the influence of gender on compliment-compliment response exchanges mainly on the following questions: 1. What is the social function of a compliment and a compliment response? 2. How do men and women use compliments and respond to compliments differently? 3. What social and cultural messages do these differences convey? Analysis of such behavior is based on data from two sources: one is ethnographic, observing actual speech and collecting large samples of occurrences with attention to situational and interactional parameters; the other one is elicited, constructing situations and ask subjects to project their behavior. The final result indicates that in China women indeed differ from men in the aspects of compliment use and the ways of responding a compliment. These differences chiefly lie in the following aspects: ? Women give and receive more compliments than men do. ? Women prefer the topic of appearance while men prefer that of ability. Furthermore, majority of the compliments on ability to women are given by men. ? Male compliments tend to be accepted whereas female compliments tend to meet with Nonacceptance responses. ? Comparatively, Male-Female interactions show stronger preference for Agreement response and more frequent use of Question type while Female-Male interactions demonstrate a stronger likelihood of Nonagreement response and its three subtypes: Scale Down, Disagreement and Qualification. These findings are in support of the research on the connection of language and gender: generally, women tend to be other-oriented and men control-oriented, which reflects a social fact in China that women are in a position relatively lower than men. This paper, however, is a tentative study. The conclusions cannot be overgenerated because great majority of the data were collected among people of middle class. And the differences discovered are sex-preferential rather than sex-exclusive.