The Use Of Compliments In A Chinese Family Setting With Reference To I Love My Home

The speech act is a revealing mirror for social rules and cultural norms, whose descriptive analysis of the conventions, patterns, and constraints together comprise native speakers' knowledge of what constitutes appropriate speech behavior in their speech communities. The thesis takes a significant branch in the various types of speech acts - complimenting - as a breakthrough point for sociolinguistic study, and confines complimenting into the family setting of I Love My Home.I Love My Home is the most successful situation comedy in China, and creates a miracle in the audience rating in the history of Chinese TV programs. The comedy depicts a family of six and the plot of each episode is manifested through the use of Beijing colloquial language. Thus, the family in I Love My Home provides an ideal oral environment for data collection of this paper.In an attempt of combining Chinese linguistic data and western politeness and power and solidarity theories, the dissertation tries to employ the politeness theories to explain and analyze complimenting, and explore the interpersonal relationship in the family of I Love My Home based on power and solidarity theory.The analysis on the linguistic data refers to the Western parameters: compliment formulas, topics, functions (purposes) and responses. The respective occurrence frequency is explained and discussed when necessary.Out of all these studies, surfaces the characteristics of the complimentary usages in I Love My Home. The strategic style of using the compliments between the family members deserves considerable attention and further studies. A trend of power declining and solidarity ascending is salient. Though with some power maintenance actions, on the whole, the concept of equality or solidarity is gaining the upper hand over power in the relationship between family members.