A Contrastive Study On Compliments And Responses Of Americans And Chinese

In this highly developed technological world, cultural exchange becomes more and more frequent than ever before, and it also happens that the communication between China and America is much common. Holmes (1988a:485) highly advocates compliments as "a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speakers, usually the person addressed, for some'good'(possession, characteristic skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer". According to Wolfson (1983:89) compliments have been said to "grease the social wheels" and thus to serve as "social lubricants". Then what are the characteristics of the American compliment and the Chinese compliment speech act and what are the similarities and disparities between them in daily communication?Using questionnaires as the main method, this study intends to investigate compliment speech acts, explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and American compliments and responses and discusses the possible factors that involve in these similarities and differences.This research includes two stages. Stage one mainly consists of blank filling tasks which have been conducted among two groups of altogether sixty subjects. Both of them are from English major seniors from Central China Normal University. The aim of this stage is to find essential information for DCT designing of stage two. In stage two, Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which has been delivered among another two groups of people is employed as principle data eliciting methods. Group one consists of 40 people from Chinese major of Central China Normal University, Group Two consists of 50 Americans from Binghamton University majoring in Education. The DCT is used to elicit data to report on compliment and compliment responses of Americans and Chinese students. Quantitative research, especially statistical method has been employed in the analysis process.The study has found out that native American students and Chinese students share something in common in their expressive ways of speaking by using more explicit sentences than implicit ones, and they use more exclamations and declaratives in compliments. On the other hand, they distinct from each other in compliments contents as well as more appellations have been added by American students in their compliments than their Chinese counterparts. What's more, native Chinese and American students tend to use phatic function in line with declaratives in their compliment responses, however, their contents of compliment responses are different and American students more often use accept strategy while Chinese students seem to accept or evade often in their compliment responses.The study makes further empirical inquiry into compliment speech acts and the comparison and contrast of Mandarin Chinese and American English. It offers some indications for the significance of personal differences and cultural factors in the foreign language teaching. It is hoped that this study may shed some light on foreign language teaching methods.