Chinese College Students' Gender Differences In Compliment Behavior

In the past decades, compliment has always been one of the hot topics studied by linguists. However, most of the scholars at home and abroad focus their researches on compliments in English varieties, and a few of them carries out studies on Chinese compliments, let alone studies on gender differences of Chinese compliments. This paper studies gender differences in Chinese compliments. It is hoped that the present study can make some contribution to the researches in the field.Based on speech act theory, politeness principle and gender difference theory, this study aims to discuss whether there are any gender differences in Chinese complimenting by college students. The present study analyzes the compliments used by male and female college students in terms of compliment formulas, topics, compliment strategies and response strategies. The author in the thesis summarizes the social functions of compliments in Chinese, and finds the reasons why male and female students in Chinese colleges are different in compliment behavior.The data are collected by observing and recording the compliments and compliment responses used by college students. After that, the author categorizes and calculates the data, shows the characteristics of the compliments in tables.The results show that there exist differences in using compliments between male and female students. As for positive semantic carriers, male students use more nouns and verbs than female students while female students use more adverbs. In terms of topics, female students compliment more on appearance while male students compliment more on performance. With regard to compliment strategy, female students use a little more Explicit Compliment strategies than male students while male students use a little more Implicit Compliment and Non-Compliment strategies than female students. As for compliment response strategy, male and female students have significant differences. Male students employ more No Response strategies and Acceptance strategies than female students while female students choose more Acceptance with Amendment strategies, Non-Acceptance strategies and Combination strategies than male students. On gender levels, the differences on the same-gender level are more distinct than those on the different-gender level.