A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Compliments

Complimenting, said to be a social "lubricant", is a positive and frequently used speech act. Based on the previous studies on compliment speech act both at home and abroad, together with compliment speech acts in literature like plays, novels and movie clips, guided by speech act theory and politeness principle, this paper centers on comparing and analyzing compliment speech act in English and Chinese cultures in terms of syntactic level, semantic level, compliment topic, compliment response, along with implied cultural factors. These studies aim to provide a good understanding of how to perform and accept compliments appropriately in different cultural backgrounds.It can be concluded that both English compliments (ECs) and Chinese compliments (CCs) can be interpreted as formulaic on basic syntactic level and semantic level. But they differ greatly on semantic level, as ECs lack of originality while CCs are characterized by richness in words selection. Chinese culture-based rhetorical phenomena and ritualized phrases like idioms, vulgarisms etc are two noticeable traits of CCs. Both ECs and CCs focus their topics on such four aspects as appearance, achievement and ability, trait, possession though they are different in preferred ones. As for responding strategy, "Modesty strategy" is more frequently used in CCs, whereas strategies of "Accepting" and "Returning" are more common in ECs.The cultural differences between Chinese and English contexts are fully reflected by the differences between the two compliment sets, which helps people understand the different cultural backgrounds better, hence to improve their intercultural communicative competence, especially that of how to give and receive compliments properly on intercultural occasions. Meanwhile, contrastive studies on ECs and CCs are of significant implications both for English teaching in China and Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL). Finally, by taking teaching CCs to non-native learners as an example, the author further discusses the indispensability of teaching Chinese culture in TCSL classroom from an intercultural perspective, some feasible ways of teaching Chinese idioms and figure of speech are also raised based on the semantic characteristics of CCs studied previously.