A Contrastive Study On Compliments And Compliment Responses In Chinese And American English

Complimenting speech acts are frequently used in interpersonal communications. American English and Chinese abound with compliments, and they can serve to greet, thank, encourage, and apologize during the discourse. Indeed, complimenting is a particularly suitable speech act to investigate in comparative studies, as it acts as a window through which we can view what is valued by a particular culture. Every nation has the unique language and culture with its own contents and manifestations, and accordingly, noticeable differences exist in complimenting and compliment responding between Americans and Chinese.Based on the data provided by Wolfson and Manes (1980, 1981), Pomerantz (1978) and Herbert (1989, 1990) and the data collected through the Compliment Situation Task Questionnaire, this paper makes a comparison between American English and Chinese covering the compliment semantic forms, syntactic patterns, response strategies and the underlying cultural values. In addition, complimenting behaviors may be influenced by such factors as social status, age, gender, family, education and others. The study makes a tentative exploration of the influence of education background on the participants' behaviors, and another comparison is made—that between Chinese complimenters at low and high education levels.This paper consists of seven chapters.Chapter One provides basic perspectives of compliment study that encompass definition, structure, function and classification of compliments in a broad sense.Chapter Two first presents a previous study review on the development of complimenting at home and abroad. Then the rationale and the methodology of this study are discussed in the second part.Chapter Three concerns itself with the semantic formulas of compliments. Major findings suggest that American and Chinese compliments are similar in the formulaic nature and different in the actual choices of positive semantic load carriers; additionally, the two groups of Chinese complimenters show surprising similarities in this aspect.