Chinese College Students' Compliment Responses As Realization Of Dynamic Adaptation To The Social World

Responding to a compliment poses a dilemma for speakers because they have to balance two diametrically conflicting conversational principles: to agree with one's conversational co-participants and to avoid self-praise. Far from being universal, the solution to the above dilemma hinges upon different social norms. Using the data for a questionnaire survey, this study provides an analysis of compliment responses in Chinese as they are used by Chinese college students, with a view to explaining the adaptive use of language in compliment responses. Responding to a compliment in this thesis will be understood as a process, which is a socially anchored form of behavior to acknowledge that the recipient of the compliment hears and reacts to the compliment, and this process is dynamic and adaptation-driven. The theoretical framework for this thesis is mainly derived from a new pragmatics theory known as the Theory of Linguistic Adaptability by Verschueren (1999).Based on Herbert's (1989) and Farghal & Al-Khatib's taxonomies of compliment responses, 1440 compliment responses by Chinese college students are collected and some of them are examined in detail. The results show that there is an overall tendency for Chinese college students to accept compliments. Relative power, social distance, gender, topic, and even the majors that the students specialize in have some relations with their compliment response behaviors.Explanations are placed within the framework based on Verschueren's adaptation theory. It is shown that Chinese college students adapt their responding behaviors to the social world which includes the college social setting. Western culture influences, Chinese traditional culture and the social development in contemporary China.Finally, 1 will discuss the implications of these findings for cross-cultural communication and foreign language acquisition.