A Contrastive Study Of Compliments And Compliment Response Strategies In English And Chinese

Compliment, which is also called praise, is a polite speech act that is frequently used in people's daily verbal interaction. It is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed or the things related to the person addressed, for some "good" (possession, achievement, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer. A compliment event has the social function of establishing and maintaining harmonious interpersonal relations in interpersonal communications. It can serve to greet, thank, encourage and congratulate, open conversations and erase conflicts, etc.. Compliment is a common speech act of all countries, but it is influenced and confined by factors such as specific social backgrounds, cultural values and communicative routines, etc.. Therefore, there exist great differences between different cultural compliments.In this thesis interpretations are placed within the theoretical framework of speech act theories and politeness principles in the West and China. The study centres on comparing and analyzing compliment speech acts in English and Chinese cultures in terms of syntactic level, lexical level, compliment topics, targets of compliments, and compliment response strategies. It can be concluded that the differences between English compliments (ECs) and Chinese compliments (CCs) arise from the different cultural backgrounds and cultural values in both languages. This study aims to provide a good understanding of how to perform and accept compliments appropriately in different cultural backgrounds. The English data are from some scholars' previous studies on compliment speech acts abroad and the Chinese data are from the research results that the author has got from the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) on Chinese compliments and natural observation.The results show that both English compliments and Chinese compliments can be interpreted as formulaic on basic syntactic level and lexical level. But they differ greatly on semantic level, as ECs lack of originality while CCs are characterized by richness in word selection. Both ECs and CCs focus their topics on four aspects as appearance, achievement, ability and possession though they are different in preferred ones. ECs concentrate more on the topics on appearance and possession, while CCs favor the topics on achievement and ability. As for responding strategies, "Modesty strategy" is more frequently used in CCs, whereas strategies of "Acceptance" and "Return" are more common in ECs.There are seven chapters in this thesis. Chapter I is about the literature review which is mainly about the compliment research abroad and at home. Chapter II presents the theoretical bases: speech act theories and politeness theories. Chapter III introduces the research methods and how the data are collected. Chapters IV and V make a contrastive study of compliment events from the lexical level and syntactical level, topics, targets as well as responses of compliments. Chapter VI tells that the differences between ECs and CCs arise from the different cultural backgrounds and values in English and Chinese. Chapter VII discusses the implications and suggestions for cross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching.The cultural differences between Chinese and English contexts are fully reflected by the differences between the two compliment sets, which help people understand the different cultural backgrounds better, hence to improve their intercultural communicative competence, especially that of how to give and receive compliments properly on intercultural occasions. Meanwhile, contrastive studies on ECs and CCs are significant for English teaching in China and for improving intercutural communicative competence. Thus, from the analyses, we can get such practical educational implications in English teaching: understand the different cultural backgrounds better, raise our cross-cultural awareness and improve our intercultural communicative competence.