Complimenting In Chinese-Cross-cultural Analysis Of Linguistic Formulation

Study of the speech act of complimenting has long been given attention. Western scholars have done a lot of research on English compliments. Three syntactic patterns accounted for nearly two-thirds of the 686 compliments collected by Manes and Wolfson (1981). They thus concluded that compliments in middle-class American society are formulaic. Recently, several Chinese scholars have also put forward their understanding of Chinese complimenting based on their research of this field. Their results also revealed the formulaic nature of Chinese compliments. As we know, the importance for a language learner to realize a speech act appropriately in the specific target speech community is never to be denied in language acquisition. Thus, the validity of the research results should be guaranteed in the most degree. Otherwise, the significance of these studies over language acquisition and other aspects would be diminished and even become misleading.This thesis, therefore, is aimed to discover some possible problems in previous studies of this area and what's more, to raise the awareness of culture specification of speech acts across cultures. Based on the discussion of speech act theories, politeness theories and methodology in pragmatic study, the thesis presents a critical review of research done by Chinese scholars on Chinese complimenting. Two research questions are raised which a questionnaire is designed to answer: 1. What are the factors that can possibly influence complimenting in Chinese? 2. What are the possible ways for realizing compliments in Chinese? The questionnaire is made up of multiple-choice part and open-question part, and 100 copies were handed out in total. Subjects of this investigation are limited to some undergraduate students from different departments of Zhejiang University and some professionals with at least 1.5-year working experience. Contradictions to the previous studies on Chinese compliments are found, such as on compliments sorting. After further illustration, the present thesis concludes that there are some problems in the previous studies, such as their data-collection methods, their consideration of nonverbal behavior and context. Thus, the thesis points out that 'a more balanced picture of complimenting is required' (Boyle) in Chinese and the overlook of some extremely important factors in realizing complimenting, such as nonverbal behavior, context etc. should by no means go on, and studies should not risk excluding implicit compliments from data which might be proven to be common in Chinese compliments. Limitations of the present thesis are offered and further directions in the relevant study are suggested in the end.