A Comparative Study Of Compliments In English And Chinese From A Cross-Cultural Perspective

A compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to the receiver, usually the person addressed or referred, for some 'good' (possessions, characteristic, skill, etc.). Complimenting is said to be a social lubricant, which is primarily aimed at "thanking, encouraging, greeting, apologizing, and supporting or maintaining the addressee's face." Compliments are frequently applied in social communication. And how to give compliments and respond to them constitute a significant part of the communicative competence of every member in a speech community. However, studies of compliments and compliment responses have shown that this speech event is actually far more complicated than it appears in terms of the relation between language and culture. Indeed, complimenting is a particularly suitable speech act to investigate in comparative studies, as it acts as a window through which we can view what is valued by a particular culture. As such, this study was designed to analyze the similarities and differences of compliments in both Chinese and English.Nearly all the compliment cases including compliment responses in this paper come originally from Chinese and English movie clips and TV series, a few from some famous linguist's works. This study focuses on compliments from a cross-cultural perspective, comparing different aspects of English and Chinese compliments. Specifically, it includes the compliment forms, topic distribution, compliment response, as well as the social functions of compliments. The objectives of this study are to: 1) explore the similarities and differences between English and Chinese compliments in terms of their forms, topics, responding strategies and social functions, and 2) analyze the influence of cultures on compliments in both English and Chinese. It is expected that the findings of this study can help learners better understand the compliments of the two languages so that they can communicate more appropriately in this aspect in the future.It can be concluded that both English compliments and Chinese compliments can be interpreted as formulaic on basic syntactic level and semantic level. But they differ greatly on semantic level. English compliments lack originality while Chinese compliments are characterized by richness in words selection. Chinese culture-based rhetorical phenomena and ritualized phrases like idioms and vulgarisms are two noticeable traits of Chinese compliments. Both English compliments and Chinese compliments focus their topics on the three aspects: appearance, ability and trait, and possession, though they are different in preferred ones. Topics on ability share a high frequency in Chinese compliments, but a relatively low frequency in English compliments. Topics on appearance are the most preferential ones by English speaking people, but not so popular in Chinese society. It's natural to compliment other's possessions in western context, while it's not always safe to praise other's possessions in China, especially between people in close relation. As for responding strategy, "Modesty strategy" is more frequently used in Chinese compliments, whereas strategies of "Accepting" and "Returning" are more common in English compliments.The cultural differences between Chinese and English contexts are fully reflected by the differences between the two compliments. It is hoped that the findings of this study can help people understand the differences in English and Chinese compliments, hence to improve their intercultural communicative competence, especially in giving and responding to compliments properly on intercultural occasions. Also the comparative study can provide significant implications for culture teaching and learning in English in China.