A Contrastive Analysis Of The Speech Acts Of Complimenting In American English And Chinese

With the increasingly frequent development of international communication, it becomes more and more crucial to cultivate and improve people's intercultural communicative competence in meeting the demands of an integrated society and world.This present thesis centers on comparing and analyzing compliment speech act in Chinese and American English in an effort to provide an understanding of how to give and accept compliments appropriately in different cultural backgrounds because compliments occur in a very wide variety of situations and serve to produce or to reinforce a feeling of solidarity between interlocutors. With efforts to discover several problems in the studies of the speech act of complimenting, this thesis intends to have a second thought of those studies having been made and promote further researches of the speech acts.By analyzing compliments in terms of semantic and syntactic patterns, topics and responses, the author presents the findings that compliments in American English and Chinese 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. However, Chinese and American complimenting behaviors contain their own peculiar emphasis in the above aspects. Chinese compliments favor the topics of achievements and abilities, while American compliments concentrates more on the topics of appearances and possessions. In general, compliments are frequently performed by the inferiors in Chinese while by superiors in American English. Moreover, regarding compliment responses, more indirect responding strategies such as no acknowledgement and praise downgrade are used in Chinese compliments, whereas strategies of accepting and returning are more frequently used in American compliments.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, hence to improve their intercultural communicative competence. The problems being raised and discussed in this thesis may serve as an additional thought for the following linguists researching not only the speech act of complimenting but also other kinds of speech acts to consider and make efforts to solve or tackle. The findings of the cross-cultural study thus may serve as an additional empirical basis for the discussion of the frequently debated sotiolinguistic issue, "universality of speech behavior".