A Comparative Study Of Compliment And Compliment Response Strategies Employed By Chinese And American University Students

This study was undertaken to investigate the compliment and compliment response strategies employed by Chinese and American university students from the perspective of cross-cultural communication. The purpose of this study is to facilitate cross-cultural communication and improve the foreign language learners'pragmatic competence. The theoretical framework was speech act theory of Austin and Searle, politeness theory of Leech, Brown & Levinson, as well as politeness theory of Gu in China.The research questions to be addressed in this study are as follows:1.What are the compliment strategies employed by the Chinese and American university students?2.What is the distribution of the compliment strategies employed by the Chinese and American university students?3. What are the similarities and differences in employing the compliment strategies between the Chinese and American university students?4.What are the compliment responses strategies employed by the Chinese and American university students?5.What is the distribution of the compliment response strategies employed by the Chinese and American university students?6. What are the similarities and differences in employing the compliment responses strategies between Chinese and American university students?Altogether 80 subjects were involved in this study and they fell into two groups. One group consisted of 60 sophomores in Changzhou Institute of Technology. The other group consisted of 20 American students from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in the U.S. The instrument employed was a 16-item DCT drawn from Ye (1995). The data analysis involved three steps: categorizing the compliment and compliment response strategies, calculating the overall percent of the strategies and employing independent samples t- test.The major findings from this study are as follows:1.Both Chinese and American university students employed the five same compliment strategies and both employed Direct compliment strategy most frequently.2. With regard to compliment response strategies, both Chinese and American university students employed more Combination strategy and had much common ground in employing Acceptance strategy.3.Chinese university students employed eight main compliment response strategies with Amendment most frequently employed, while American university students employed six of them with Acceptance most frequently employed.4.Chinese university students generally tended to accept rather than reject when responded to compliments. Leech's Agreement Maxim, rather than Gu's Modesty Norm seemed to be the overriding motivation for Chinese university students in responding to compliments.This study has two major limitations. First, the number of the subjects in the two groups is unbalanced. Second, the data collected from the DCT were not as naturalistic as those collected from natural situations and could not fully reflect the authentic performance of language use in daily life.