A Study On Compliment Responses Of Chinese Farmers From The Perspective Of Social Variables

Compliment, as a positive speech act, aroused great attention and became a major concern in the field of sociolinguistics. It is also a kind of Adjacency Pair, which means the person being complimented has to respond appropriately to the compliment. Therefore, the studies on compliment should be conducted together with those on compliment responses.Based on data analysis, this paper tries to investigate compliment response strategies adopted by Chinese farmers from the perspective of social variables in light of Gu Yueguo's politeness theory in Chinese context. One of the major tasks of modern linguistics is to investigate objectively the language people actually use. Therefore, this study can make clear the characteristics of compliment response strategies employed by Chinese farmers.Two approaches, DCT(Discourse Completion Test) questionnaire and participant observation, are used to collect data from 120 farmers in different regions, 86 of whom are believed to be eligible for the convenience of the study. Male and female subjects account for half of the total number respectively. Finally 946 cases of valid compliment responses are gathered, of which 860 are from DCT questionnaire and 86 from participant observation. The results show: 1) in overall distribution, Acceptance turns out to be the first choice of Chinese farmers, amounting to 35.4%. Rejection, which is the prescribed norm of responding to the compliment, takes up 18.4%. Acceptance+ Amendment, No response and Combination account for 28.5%, 13% and 4.7% respectively. 2) in gender group, men use more No response strategy than women do, while women prefer more Combination strategy than men do. 3) in age group, the younger-aged people tend to accept compliment while the older-aged people use more Acceptance+Amendment strategy. 4) in education group, farmers with lower education employ more No response strategy than those with higher education do.This study, first of all, furthers the speech act studies in Chinese context, especially in a specific group of population. Second, variation theories will be applied to the investigation of compliment responses. Therefore, the scope of variation theory would be broadened.This paper is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction about the motivation and purposes of the study and the organization of the paper. Chapter Two is a general survey on relevant literatures. In this chapter, Speech Act Theory and Politeness theories will be also reviewed. Chapter Three mainly focuses on methodology and data collection of the study. Chapter four will be the results and discussions of the study within the framework of Chinese Politeness Principle. It attempts to prove the great importance of social variables in compliment responses of Chinese farmers. In chapter five, the writer concludes the major findings of the study and the limitations and suggestions for further research. The originality of the paper is the combination of the study of social variables with that of compliment responses among Chinese farmers.