A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And American Compliment Responses And The Culture And Gender Factors

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, almost no research involves the contrast of Chinese-English compliment responses. And 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 they respond to compliments.What's the case in China? Under the different cultural backgrounds, how the Chinese and English-speaking people to respond other's compliments? How does the factor of gender affect compliment behavior? This paper aims at investigating the influence of gender on compliment response exchanges mainly on the following questions:1. What are the influences of the culture on the compliment responses?2. How do men and women respond to compliments differently?Based on the data collected in the form of DCT, restricted by the factors concerning cultural differences, the compliment responses used by Chinese and English are different. In addition, the cultural factors impacting on the choice of the compliment responses are analyzed. Meanwhile, analyzes the differences in using the compliment responses by male and female.This paper, however, is a tentative study. The conclusions cannot be over-generated because the research was made among the students in colleges.Chapter One is introduction. Chapter two reviews the some theoretical backgrounds: the studies of speech act, the studies of politeness, the differences of the"face"concepts, and the previous studies of compliment responses.Chapter three introduces the relationship of the culture and the language and reviews the differences between the Chinese and Western. Also introduces the relationship between the gender and the language.Chapter four compares the compliment responses from the aspects of culture and gender firstly. And also the cultural and gender factors that influenced the English and Chinese compliment response are reviewed.Chapter five is conclusion.