A Pragmatic Study Of Chinese Compliment Responses: An Adaptation-Based Approach

Compliments and compliment responses play very important roles in the people's communication. And the study of compliment(C) and compliment response (CR) has undoubtedly been one of the most intriguing topics in synchronic linguistics in the last three decades. But few of the studies are conducted in the Chinese context, and the results vary greatly from one another, the researchers don't agree with each other. These disagreements, to a large degree, result from their weakness in research range and methods. First, these studies mostly confined their subjects to college students or those with academic background. Second, these studies only used discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire to collect data, and rarely referred to other resources in their data gathering and analysis. More importantly, previous studies on Chinese compliment events mostly took a static perspective.This study investigates the adaptability in the compliment responding behavior in the process of conversational interaction performed by native speakers of Chinese in their daily communication. Responding to a compliment in this thesis will be understood as a process, and this process is dynamic and adaptation-driven. The theoretical framework in this thesis is mainly derived from a new pragmatic theory known as the Theory of Linguistic Adaptability (or Adaptation Theory for short) initiated, developed and elaborated by Verschueren (1987, 1995, 1998, 1999), together with some other pragmatics theories such as speech act theory and politeness theory. Speech act theory and politeness theory provide us with the starting point from which we approach the research topic, and adaptation theory will be exploited as a tool to understand and explain the respondents' choice making process. It claims that using language must consist of the continuous making of linguistic choices. Consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal (i.e. structural) and/or language-external reasons, speakers do not only choose forms they also choose strategies. The respondent adapts his linguistic and strategic choices to the context for the sake of communication success.By using the data from natural observation, an interview and a questionnaire survey, this study provides an analysis of compliment respoases in Chinese context, with a view to explain the adaptive use of language in compliment responses. 2480 compliment responses by native speakers of Chinese are collected and some of them are examined in detail. The results show that there is an overall tendency for Chinese to accept compliments, and their compliment response behaviors are proved to be affected by such variables as relative power, social distance, gender, educational level, age and topic. Explanations are placed within the framework based on Verschueren's adaptation theory. It is shown that Chinese adapt their responding behaviors to the communicative context which includes language users, the social world, the mental world. And Chinese people's responding behaviors are a process of dynamic.