Gender Difference In The Realization Patterns Of Compliments In The Chinese Speech Communication

The complimenting speech act is very important in people's daily life. Using the theories and the research methods of social-linguistics and discourse-linguistics, the purpose of this study is to examine whether there are any differences between men and women in their realization patterns of the compliment-proffering and compliment responses. First , this paper redefine and reclassify the compliment. And then, based on a corpus of 318examples from 17 movies and teleplays, this paper discusses the differences between men and women in their realization patterns of the compliment from five perspectives.The statistical results show that, on the whole there existed significant differences between men and women in performing the speech act set. Men and women also showed distinct differences in using compliment response strategies. Furthermore, topic and the relationship between speakers and the listeners also contribute to the gender difference. This study also analyses the reason of why gender differences existed from psychology and culture aspect.