A Contrastive Study Of Compliment Response Strategies Between Americans And Chinese

According to Austin(1975) and Searle(1969), speech acts are the building blocks of social interaction, functioning as the deep structure in daily conversation. Compliments (Cs) and Compliment Responses (CR) , as specific speech acts, have been one of the major areas on which linguists focused their attention and drew insights into the phenomenon of linguistic politeness in the last three decades. However, most of the studies focus on English only or Chinese only, and little work has been done in comparison between the two cultures. In fact, the existing comparison of CR studies between the two cultures is only from the point of view of pragmatics, and most of them are qualitative and criticized as subjective and unreliable.The present study is thus conducted. By combining the strengths of the sociolinguistic and pragmatic methods, this study aims at a complete picture of comparison of Chinese CR and American CR and the degree of the difference of the preference patterns of CR strategies among different social groups in the two cultures.The data are collected through the method of discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire. For the study, 110 native Chinese speakers and 80 native English speakers (from America) are respectively selected from different gender, age, educational level and social position groups. The produced data are analyzed quantitatively with the aid of Chi-square statistical tool. And when the significant differences are identified, they would be interpreted qualitatively in sociolinguistic and pragmatic point of view to prove the hypothesis: as for different gender, age, educational level, and social position groups in one culture, different CR strategies will be chosen; and degree of the difference will be various in different cultures.The results suggest that, overall, there is significant difference in choosing CR strategies between Chinese and American. In China, the correlation between the respondents' CR strategy choice and their gender, age, educational level and social position is obvious; and in America, except the gender, the other three social variables have little correlation with the respondents' CR strategy choice.The following are the typical reasons: 1) The functions of compliments are diverse due to variant cultures; 2) There are different principles to judge whether a person is polite or not in different cultures; 3) There are variant values in different cultures, and even in one culture, the focused value is diverse due to different social groups.Methodologically, as an interdisciplinary study of sociolinguistic and pragmatic, the study renders a new perspective for the study of intercultural communication. For practice, its findings have valuable implications both for cross-cultural communications and the teaching of foreign languages.