On The Gender Differences In Compliments Of Chinese College Students

Compliment is a speech act which happens with a high frequency in our daily lives, of all the speech acts studied by foreign researchers in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, complimenting behaviors have received more widespread attention in the past twenty years. Among the large amount of research on compliments, only a few focus on the gender differences. Moreover, most of the studies on gender differences in compliment behavior are conducted in English-speaking countries, aiming at the English language, and the researches on other languages are rather limited. Therefore, the writer believes that it is necessary to investigate the phenomenon in other communities.The purpose of the present study is to explore the gender differences in paying Compliments and receiving Compliment Response among Chinese college students. Analyses are conducted based on gender difference theory, dominance theory and politeness theory. The data are elicited by the means of the open-ended questionnaire known as DCT and are analyzed by SPSS 11.5 software. The subjects chosen in the present study are a group of 200 college students, with 100 males and 100 females, of all the 195 answer sheets collected, 188 are invalid. Excluding the invalid questionnaires and also in order to meet equilibrium in gender, the researcher sorted out 184 questionnaires among which 92 copies were from males and 92 copies were from females.The paper is mainly established in three steps. First of all, it introduces the gender differences in compliment behavior showing in the pioneers' works; Secondly, the researcher analyzes the data collected and interprets them; lastly, the researcher attempts to explain the reasons why there exist differences in complimenting.Confined by the writer's capability and limited research condition, there are some inevitable limitations. However, the researcher simply hopes that the thesis could inspire further studies in this field.