Social Variation In Compliment Respones Strategies

As one of the most intriguing topics of synchronic linguistics, compliment response (CR) has received much attention from the researchers in various subfields of linguistics, such as pragmatics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, contrastive linguistics and cross-cultural communication. Most of their studies, however, focus on English, a little work has been done in Chinese context. In fact, the existing CR studies on Chinese are mostly qualitative and being criticized as subjective and unreliable. But the few empirically-based studies in existence are equally problematic due to the sharp disagreement in their findings and the limitations in their methodology. Moreover, Chinese society has been undergoing unprecedented changes in her politics, economy as well as cultural values resulted from its opening up and reform ever since 1980's. All these changes should have a great impact on their language use. But few studies have addressed the changes and variations occurring in reality within the society.The present study on the changes and variations in Chinese CR behavior is thus conducted. By combining the strengths of the sociolinguistic and pragmatic methods, this study aims at a complete picture of Chinese CR and the preference patterns of CR strategies among different social groups.Constructed on the theoretical framework of sociolinguistic variation, this study proposes that there exists systematic variation in Chinese CR strategy use in terms of the social parameters of the respondents' gender, age and educational level. Two kinds of variables are identified: the linguistic variable of CR strategy and the social variables of gender, age and educational level. There should be a correlation between the linguistic variable and social variables.Four research questions are addressed: 1. What is the overall tendency for native Chinese speakers to respond to compliments? 2. Do men and women respond to compliments differently, if so, how? 3. Do people of different age respond to compliments differently, if so, how? 4. Do people of different educational level respond to compliments differently, if so, how?The data are collected through a combination method of discourse completetion test (DCT) questionnaire and interview. For the study, 126 native Chinese speakers are selected from different gender, age, educational level andoccupation groups through the method of judgment sampling. The produced data are analyzed quantitatively with the aid of Chi-square statistical tool. When significant tendencies are identified, they would be interpreted qualitatively in sociolinguistic and pragmatic point of view.The results suggest that, overall, native Chinese speakers respond to compliments differently from stereotypically expected and there is a correlation between the respondents' CR strategy choice with their gender, age and educational level: 1. Chinese speakers accept compliments more often than reject them; Implicit Acceptance is their leading choice in compliment responding. 2. Women use Explicit Acceptance more often than men, while the latter use more Deflection and Explicit Rejection. 3. The younger use more Explicit Acceptance than the older, while the older use more Deflection and Explicit Rejection than the younger. 4. The more educated prefer Explicit Acceptance to Deflection and Explicit Rejection, whereas the less educated have the opposite pattern.As the first one to address the changes and variations in Chinese speech act, this study assumes its significance in several ways. Theoretically, it widens the application scope of the current variation theory and enlightens the crucial role of culture in politeness. Methodologically, as an interdisciplinary study of sociolinguistic and pragmatic, the study renders a new perspective to studies of the two areas. For practice, its findings have valuable implications both for cross-cultural communications and the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.