A Probe Into Compliments In Chinese

Compliments, as a type of polite speech act, are frequently applied in social communication. Issues like how to pay compliments and respond to them appropriately constitute an essential component of communicative competence. It has been revealed that this small speech act is far more complicated than it appears since it involves many social and cultural factors. Previous studies have concentrated on the following aspects: linguistic realizations, distribution, function, and gender differences of English varieties. There is little research on compliments in other linguistic-cultural systems, however. The present study attempts to probe into compliments and compliment responses in the Chinese language. It is valuable because it will not only contribute to the understanding of the speech act of compliment cross-culturally but will also provide new insights in the study of the Chinese language. In addition, such study can promote the intercultural communication and the study of Chinese as a second language.The present study approaches Chinese compliments and compliment responses from a pragmatic perspective. In order to obtain rich corpus, observations and interviews have been carried out among the native Chinese speakers of different ages, genders and professions. By arranging and analyzing these data, the author makes a descriptive study of Chinese compliments, addressing issues like linguistic realizations, responding strategies, social function and the underlying cultural values.Most compliments are explicit and direct in the Chinese language. The syntactic patterns of adjectival explicit compliments are 1) (Your) NP (ADV) ADJ (PART); 2) (You) ADV ADJ; 3) (You) V ADJ NP.The syntactic patterns of adverbial explicit compliments are. 4) You V NP (ADV) ADV (PART) and 5) (You) V (ADV) ADV (PART); the nominal explicit compliments usually take the pattern of You Be/ Have NP. The last category is verbal explicit compliments, following the pattern of I like (your) NP. Semantically, words like "good", "not bad", " pretty" are of the most frequently used. Positive and evaluative nouns usually take terms like "some know-how", "a good hand" etc. The use of nouns implies categorization and reflects the Chinese cultural value that nothing is perfectly justifiable without being placed into the right categories.Four Superordinate Strategies are adopted for the native speakers of Chinese in responding to compliments: Denigrating, Accepting, Returning and Deflecting. Among these, Denigrating is the most frequently used responding strategy, which mirrors the impact of modesty, a Chinese cultural value, on complimenting behaviors in the Chinese speech community.This thesis is a tentative study in the field of speech acts. It is written to draw more attention from scholars to this aspect. The author wishes it might be helpful to those who are interested in this topic.