A Comparative Study On Compliment Speech Act In Chinese And American Movies: An Intercultural Perspective

With the increasingly frequent development of international communication, it becomes more and more urgent to cultivate and improve people's intercultural communicative competence. It is considered more and more important that culture factors play a crucial role in foreign language teaching by language teachers and researchers at home and abroad. This present paper centers on comparing and analyzing compliment speech act in the chosen Chinese and American movies in an effort to provide an understanding of how to give and accept compliments appropriately in different culture backgrounds because compliments occur in a very wide variety of situations and serve to produce or to reinforce a feeling of solidarity between interlocutors.Based on comedic stories, twenty romantic and ethical movies are chosen, including ten Chinese movies and ten American movies respectively. Totally 365 items of compliments, 156 items of Chinese compliments (hereinafter CC) and 209 items of American compliments (hereinafter AC), are collected from the movies. By analyzing CC and AC in terms of semantic and syntactic patterns, topics and responses, the author presents the findings that both CC and AC can be interpreted as formulaic: formulaic semantic and syntactic patterns; only a few general topics of appearances/possessions and achievements/abilities; high frequency of several limited response formulas. Both CC and AC, however, contain their own peculiar emphasis in the above aspects. CC shows more ritualized and rhetorical phrases related to Chinese culture, whereas AC remains in the range of limited adjectives and verbs. CC favors the topics of achievements and abilities, while AC concentrates more on the topics of appearances and possessions. In addition, some differences exist between CC and AC concerning responses to compliments. More indirect responding strategies such as no acknowledgement and praise downgrade are used in CC, whereas strategies of accepting and returning are more frequently used in AC. The cultural differences between China and America are completely reflected in the differences of the two sets of compliments. These cultural differences can help people understand the cultural backgrounds in China and America, hence to improve their intercultural communicative competence, especially that of how to give and receive compliments appropriately in an intercultural situation.