A Contrastive Study On Chinese And German Compliments And Their Responses

The term "speech act" has been defined as a minimal unit of discourse, a basic unit of communication. Complimenting is a particularly suitable speech act to investigate if people want to compare the similarities and differences between two cultures. Compliments, as a type of speech act, are frequently applied in social communication. Compliments and their responses constitute an essential component of one's communicative competence. Many researches reveal that this speech act is far more complicated than it appears and it involves many social and cultural factors. Currently, the researchers on compliments concentrate on investigating English compliments and their language form, topic distribution and frequency, function, and sex differences and so on. Studies on compliments in other languages are inadequate.Researches in this field in China started very late and are mainly preliminary introductions of researches on English compliments. Intensive works on compliments und their responses to them have been done from cross-cultural perspective; however the most of them are focused on English culture and other cultures. Cross-cultural studies on this subject in other languages lack enough attention. Based on studies abroad this paper attempts to make a cross-cultural study on Chinese and German compliments and their responses.The paper consists of three parts:introduction, main part and conclusion. In the introduction, the paper mainly describes the causes of this article, purpose, the development status of domestic and foreign researches, access to research data and text structure.The first chapter of the main part introduces the theoretical basis of this research. The second chapter is the analytical part. With the data obtained through a questionnaire, this paper compares and analyzes the functions, topics, frequency of compliments, feelings after receiving compliments and desire for more compliments and discusses reasons of the similarities and differences between these two cultures. It is hoped that with the help of this paper, people can make compliments and respond to them appropriately and avoid the unnecessary misunderstanding in the across-culture communication.The conclusion summarizes this paper and addresses its limitations and points out further research in the future.