Social Linguistic Variation In Chinese Implicit Compliments

The study of compliments has been widely concerned and lucubrated in many aspects including pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural communication. There were much more studies on explicit compliments, which are routine formulae and usually have a few syntactic patterns and a limited vocabulary, and the compliment responses. These studies are relatively penetrating. Fewer focus on implicit compliments respectively especially in Chinese context. Moreover, Chinese society has been undergoing unprecedented changes in her politics, economy as well as cultural values resulted from its opening up and reform ever since 1980s. All these changes should have a great impact on the language use. Fewer studies, however, concentrate on the strategy of implicit compliments as well as the variation change with implicit compliments users.The present thesis on the changes and variations in Chinese implicit compliments is thus conducted. Combining the theories of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, this study aims at presenting a complete picture of Chinese implicit compliments in terms of syntactic pattern, characteristics, types and preference patterns of IC strategies among different social groups.Constructed on the theoretical framework of sociolinguistic variation theory and pragmatic politeness theory, this study proposes that there exist systematic variations in the use of IC strategy on the aspects of users'age, social class and sex. Two kinds of variables are shown: the linguistic variable of IC strategies and the social variables including sex, age and social class. Based on the data, four questions will be studied: 1.What is a Chinese implicit compliment (CIC)? What are the overall analysis and distribution of CIC strategies? 2. Do men and women use ICs differently? If so, how do they differ? 3. Do people of three different age groups use ICs differently? If so, how do they differ? 4. Do people of different three middle social classes in terms of up-middle class, mid-middle class and sub-middle class use ICs differently? If so, how do they differ? The present paper is a study of quantitative and qualitative investigation. The data are collected through a combination method of obtaining ICs from films, questionnaire investigation (DCT & Choices selecting) and natural investigation. 486 ICs are collected and users'background information are also written down including age, sex, profession, educational level, technical title and position. The produced data are analyzed quantitatively with the aid of Chi-square statistical tool. When significant tendencies are identified, they would be interpreted qualitatively in sociolinguistic and pragmatic point of view.The results suggest that, CICs are positive indirect speech acts in mandarin that are less formulaic on the surface level with non-stable syntactical patterns. The comprehension of ICs depends on some indexical knowledge. It costs the addressers or addressees a little effort to think or acquire ICs. However, using ICs to compliment others turns out to be a more tactic way to maintain the hearer's positive face. There are two types of ICs: type one is defined as pivoting complimentee on all aspects (ability, appearance, possession, personality) indirectly; type two involves comparing addressee or someone to a famous people, beautiful thing or an ideal one. The CICs have their special characteristics that some popular ancient poetry, allusions, idioms or slang are used; ICs usually concentrate on the topic of ability more than the topic of appearance, possession, and personality; and to some extent of the present research, males prefer to use more ICs than females do. In the three middle social classes, the up-middle social class is willing to use ICs more than the mid-middle and sub-middle social class. The younger the people are, the more ICs they would use. Moreover, there is significant difference between the mix of each two social variables except social class and gender.This study concentrates on the Chinese implicit compliments only and gives a thorough explanation of the structure and some characteristics that are rare in the Chinese compliments studies. Then it focuses on finding the variations and changes between the use of ICs and users'social backgrounds. Its contribution to variation theory and pragmatics in Chinese culture will shed light on the research of implicit compliments. In addition, this study provides new IC data for future studies. The thesis elucidates the big positive function of ICs and gives an inspiration to people on using ICs more appropriately.