A Sociolinguistic Variation Study Of Compliment Responses In Chinese: Variable Rule Analysis

Embedded within the scope of variationist sociolinguistics as well as the theory of politeness, this dissertation is an attempt to explore the norms and patterns of compliment responses in Chinese and examine the possibility of pragmatic transference from English to Chinese. In addition, it looks at the constraints of various sociolinguistic variables on the choices open to Chinese speaker in response to compliments.This study is based on a corpus of 1,190 naturally occurring compliment exchanges, along with the interlocutors'ethnographic information including age, gender, social distance, English proficiency, education background, and the like, collected in the speech community of Shanghai which the researchers observed or in which we participated. Variable rule analysis, an analytic method of Labovian quantitative sociolinguistics will be performed to identify which of the contextual factors play influential roles in the forming of compliment responses patterns in Chinese.The findings of our study reveal that instead of overwhelmingly Non-acceptance compliments as reported in previous literature, the general tendency is for Chinese speakers to follow the order of Acceptance, Indirection and Non-acceptance as preferred strategies. However, compared with studies on compliment responses of native English speakers, it seems that the Chinese still use less Acceptance and more Indirection and Non-acceptance than their counterparts. Based on the results, it is suggested that the Chinese speakers appear to stay in a transitional period, a tendency from the Modesty Maxim to the Agreement Maxim, whereas previous studies on Chinese exchanges more often than not exhibited dissimilar formulaic dimension: the Modesty Maxim is given a much heavier value than the Agreement Maxim.Our findings also indicate that in addition to the use of a single compliment response strategy, such as Appreciation, Explanation, Return, Downgrade, Disagreement, etc., speakers in our data also use various combined types when responding to compliments. It is thus claimed that responding to a compliment is a far more complex process than giving a compliment.In addition, the results suggest that like phonological, morphological, and syntactic variables, pragmatic variables also vary systematically with such social variables as gender, age, social status, education, social class, social distance, and use of English. Besides, our study demonstrates that as a prestigious language, English appears to stamp its imprint on the pragmatics of Chinese, as is evidenced by the extensive use of acceptance rejoinder"Thank you"in response to a compliment.It is believed that the findings pertaining to the compliment event in Chinese will provide us with some interesting theoretical implications to the fields of variation theory, politeness theory and language contact theory, as well as have methodological and pedagogical implications. It is also expected the study could contribute much to other similar cases of speech acts cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, thus broadening our understanding of the universalities and peculiarities of speech acts in diverse languages.