A Contrastive Analysis Of Compliment And Criticism Strategies In The Voice Of China And America

Speech act is one of the most commonly used ways of communication, which plays an essential role in people’s daily life."Compliment" and "criticism" as the common speech acts are the two sides of the same coin when one gives comment to something. They are against each other, yet depend on each other. Compliment can enhance solidarity and shorten the social distance between interlocutors. While criticism is a face-threatening speech acts. If properly applied, it can reach the expected purpose and effects; if inappropriately used, it would worsen the relationship between the speaker and the hearer. Therefore, research on these two commonly appeared speech acts has far-reaching significance.The data of previous researches were almost collected through questionnaire or DCT(Discourse Completion Test), which lack real context and are regarded less persuasive. Based on the self-built closed corpus, which consists of6episodes in The Voice of China and6episodes in Season2of The Voice in America, the paper conducts a contrastive study of judges’compliment and criticism strategies and their responses on1012corpuses on the foundation of Speech Act Theory, Politeness Theory and Hofstede’s Theory of National Cultural Dimension. Aiming at improving cross-culture communication ability and foreign language and Chinese teaching proficiency, the paper is trying to explore the effective compliment and criticism strategies in different culture background.Through careful contrastive analysis, the major findings are as follows:(1) Based on Wolfson’s study that explicit compliments have certain syntactic patterns, the author adjusts and complements the previous patterns and created a Chinese compliment syntactic patterns which was found also highly formulaic.(2) As for the word features in the two contexts, Chinese like using idioms or proverbs to express compliment and Americans like using the most frequently appeared9adjectives to praise.(3) In the analysis of compliment response,"no acknowledgement" response is highlighted in Chinese context and its appropriateness is contrastively discussed.(4) After analyzing the16criticism strategies in Chinese and American contexts, the author try to raise a criticism response model which includes three categories:Acceptance, Rejection and No acknowledgement, which also contain their subordinate branches. And the corresponding statistic shows that these criticism strategies, such as stroking, empathy and hints are more easily accepted by addressees.