A Study Of Gender Differences In Compliments And Compliment Responses From The Perspective Of Sociolinguistics

As a positive polite speech act, compliment is frequently used in the social communication in daily life. The scholars and linguists have paid much attention to the gender differences in compliments and compliment responses because it is a hot topic in the sociolinguistics field nowadays. The social function of the act of compliments is to maintain a nice relationship with the addressees, shorten the social distance and achieve the solidarity in the communication. In addition, compliments can also be considered to be the social lubricant for the purpose of expressing encouragement, approval, admiration and praise and so on. Thus, it is very valuable to do some studies on the differences based on gender in compliments and compliment responses."Language and gender" is a significant topic in sociolinguistics, and it has received wide attentions and heated discussions since the last decades of the twentieth century. There are a lot of differences based on gender in the social communication of language. Gender is considered to be a social identity. As an important social factor, it can affect the use of language. It is an independent variable in this study and the dependent variable is the use of compliments and compliment responses.This thesis adopted Politeness Theory, Face Theory and Speech Act Theory. The study discusses the gender-specific compliments from several perspectives through the analysis of compliments and compliment responses in American TV drama Gossip Girl. The hypothesis is that there are some different points between males and females in compliments and compliment responses. The study will focus on compliment frequency, the formulas, the topic of compliment and compliment response strategy caused by gender differences.The essay mainly uses qualitative and quantitative analysis strategies and the discourse analysis and conversations are employed to deal with the data. All the materials of the study are quoted from the dialogues of the American TV drama Gossip Girl which covers from season one to six. The study of the data at present is made up of 328 compliment speech events, that is 328 compliments and 328 compliment responses. And the analysis is done by using software Excel and conclusions are drawn based on that.According to the research, compared with the males, females are more likely to use compliments to other people and receive more compliments from others as well. Second, males and females may use the formulas of compliments in different ways. In terms of the person focus, females are more likely to use personal forms on the syntactic level to compliment other people especially the first and second person while males are more inclined to use impersonal focus or the third person. Females show a greater tendency to adopt more intensifiers which reinforce the strength of compliments but males show a greater tendency to the use of less intensified words. Third, males and females use different compliment topics. Females are more likely to choose the topics of personality and appearance while males are more likely to choose ability and possessions to be their topics. Finally, the responding ways of males and females to compliments are also different. Generally speaking, females are more likely to accept compliments. But males tend to reject and evade the compliments between males compared with that of females.Through this study, it will help the second language learners to understand that they ought to focus on the use and grammatical rules. It will be helpful for them to express things properly for the purpose of improving their communicative competence and preventing the misunderstanding.