| Compliments, as a type of speech act, are frequently applied in social communication. Issues concerning how to pay compliments and respond to them appropriately constitute an essential component of communicative competence. It has been revealed that this small speech act is far more complicated than it appears since it involves many social and cultural factors.Interlanguage pragmatics studies learners-specific pragmatic performance and its relationship to learners'L1 and L2. The growing research in interlanguage pragmatics has studied a number of speech acts, such as requests and apologies, but relatively few studies examine Chinese L2 learners'compliment and compliment response behavior.Accordingly, this study extends the scope of interlanguage research to Chinese English–as-a-second-language (ESL) learners'compliment and compliment response, focusing on the strategies which they pay and respond to the speech act of compliments in a second language (L2). In this thesis, Chinese ESL (English–as-a-second-language) learners'compliment and compliment response are compared with that of native Chinese and native English speakers to reveal how they perform this speech act in different contexts.Chinese and English are pragmatically and culturally different. There are two reasons why compliments in English may be difficult for Chinese. First, native English speakers give praise in a much wider variety of situations than Chinese so that their compliments in some situations are considered inappropriate or impolite to the Chinese. Second, in many situations where the Chinese respond to praise, they prefer routinized denials (e.g.,'I'm not'), rather than appreciation tokens (e.g.,'Thank you'). To native English speakers, such routinized denials might be considered impolite or even rude.Data for this study were mainly collected via a written questionnaire in the form of the'Discourse Completion Test'(DCT). The questionnaire has both English and Chinese versions. Subjects in this study were three groups: thirty-two native Chinese students, and thirty-two Chinese learners of English and thirty-two native English speaking students. They were all groups of college students, similar in age and status, including both sexes. They were all required to pay and respond to the compliments in the designed eight situations (See Appendix A).The results show that native Chinese speakers are much less inclined to make compliments than native English speakers. Also, responses to compliments for Chinese speakers and the ESL learners are more likely to be rejections than acceptances, while the compliment responses of native English speakers are more likely to be acceptances than rejections. In addition, the performance of ESL learners can be seen to reflect L1 communicative styles and transfer appropriate L1 politeness strategies in L2 behavior. Furthermore, subjects mostly differ in their strategies across genders.Comparing the findings of the present study with those in the existing literature, we can find that the results of this study are consistent with those of others. These comparisons clearly show how critical a role contextual variable can play in the speakers'speech act performance. Following these is a detailed discussion of the issue of universality versus culture-specificity in speech act. Basically, the findings of this study support the universality claims in only a very general and imperfect manner. There have been some serious problems in applying these claims to compliment and compliment response behavior across both Chinese and English. Wiezbicka points out that objects to this universalistic stand and contends that choosing circumstances for performing certain speech acts is based on cultural norms and values rather than on certain general mechanisms.In the conclusion, we summarize this paper, address its limitations and expect its further research in the future.
|
PDF Full Text Request