A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese And American Compliment Responses

This study aims to examine the similarities and differences between the compliment response strategies employed by Chinese native speakers, Chinese L2 learners and American native speakers and to reveal the characteristics of Chinese native speakers and Chinese L2 learners in responding to compliments. In addition, the study aims to probe into how pragmatic knowledge, especially stereotypical relation in Levinson's Generalized Conversational Implicatures (henceforth GCIs), affect the choices of compliment responses by Chinese native speakers and the acquisition of the American compliment responses by Chinese L2 learners.In order to achieve these goals, two groups of subjects are selected from the students studying at the Guangzhou University. The first group consists of 48 upper-intermediate L2 learners to form the interlanguage data (IL), while the second group is comprised of 48 native Chinese speakers to constitute the Chinese native data (LI). Then, the subjects in each group are given a Discourse Completion Test (henceforth DCT) and are required to provide responses to the compliments given in the 9 conversational situations.The types of Chinese compliment responses got from this study are compared with those of American compliment responses described by Pomerantz (1978) and Herbert (1997).The percentages of compliment acceptance by Chinese native speakers and L2 learners are 68% and 69% respectively in this study. And the percentages of using appreciation tokens by Chinese native speakers and Chinese learners of English are 50% and 51% respectively in it.The results suggest that Chinese native speakers and L2 learners are more likely to accept the compliments with appreciation tokens than American native speakers. They also show that the phenomenon of adopting the response strategies of the American compliment responses by the majority of Chinese native speakers and L2 learners does not conform to the traditional norms of the Chinese culture in which modesty and humility are highly valued.The percentages of compliment rejection by Chinese native speakers andChinese learners of English are only 10% and 11% in the data and are quite opposite to the results from Chen's study (1993), in his data, the rejections amounted to 95.73% for the Chinese subjects.Another finding of the study is that the frequency and the usage of the compliment response strategies of L2 learners are quite identical to those of Chinese native speakers. Besides, the L2 learners have a tendency to translate the formulaic expressions used in Chinese while responding to compliments in English.The study uses the three principles, Informativeness (I)-, Quantity (Q)- and Manner (M)-principle, especially stereotypical relation in Levinson's GCIs to analyze Chinese compliment responses. The three principles seem to be operative for Chinese speakers in selecting a response among several possible ones both in their L1 and L2.