Compliments: A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Study Of Its Realization Patterns

This study investigates how Chinese students realize both Chinese and English compliment speech acts in Yunnan Radio & TV University (YNTVU) from the perspective of pragmatics. It intends to achieve three aims. The first is to find out the similarities and differences between first-year and third-year students in their realization of this speech act. The second is to examine first-year and third-year students' pragmatic failures in English. The third is to provide a further explanation to these features on the basis of the first two aims.Pragmatics studies deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and aspects of discourse structure. Speech act theory as a foundation theory in pragmatics describes what utterances are intended to do, such as promising, apologizing, and complimenting. These acts are not only saying but also doing things as well. Searle classified speech acts into five categories: representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. My research object compliment belongs to the expressives, which are confined to Leech's Politeness Principle and Brown & Levinson's Face Theory. This thesis attempts to apply these theories to the compliment realization patterns, exploring possibilities of establishing a coherent pragmatic framework for compliment speech act.The study is conducted with sixty students of first-year English majors and another sixty students of third-year (a half of them does English Questionnaire and another half does Chinese Questionnaire) as its subjects. A qualitative stance with an emphasis on describing the similarities and differences between the first-year and third-year was taken. Data was drawn from the completion of myself-designed questionnaires by student participants. The most popular compliment topics are possession and ability according to Wolfson (1983), which provides implications to my questionnaire design, so a newly bought silk skirt, a...