A Study On The Features Of Chinese Compliment Speech Act

Compliments, called as "social lubricant", are a kind of frequently used polite speech act, which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some "good" (possessions, characteristic, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer (Holmes, 1986). They are far more complicated than they appear in terms of the relation between language, society and culture. However, most of former researches focused on English varieties, the study of compliments in other linguistic-cultural systems being so little that Chinese compliments were very limitedly touched upon. The present study attempts to carry out the study of compliment speech act in Chinese culture. The author wishes it might be helpful to those interested in this topic.Based on the findings and framework of previous studies on compliment speech act at home and abroad, together with the data from the Chinese classical literature Hong Lou Meng and natural observation, this paper analyzes Chinese compliment speech act in terms of semantic load carriers, syntactic patterns, topic distribution, social functions, response strategies, as well as the implied social and cultural values beneath it.The results indicate: Chinese compliments can also be regarded as formulaic both on semantic and syntactic level. But they are characterized by the richness in words and expressions embodied by diversity of adjectives, more frequently used adverbs & nouns and a large amount of Chinese culture-based idioms and rhetoric phenomena. More implicit compliments in Chinese compliments (CCs) make the syntactic structures more original and various. CCs' topics mainly fall into four categories: personality, ability, appearance, and possessions, among which those have strong Chinese flavor include benevolence, loyalty, filial piety, topics about "oldness" & "natural quality", etc. CCs are mainly utilized to increase or consolidate the solidarity between speaker and hearer, can also be used together with other speech acts to make them realized more easily, and sometimes function as flattery resulted from the motivation of the complimenter to get favorable treatment from the complimentee. Under the influence of Modesty Maxim in traditional Chinese culture, Chinese people intend to use Self-denigration and Disagreement Strategy when responding to compliments.The present paper is divided into six chapters: Chapter One introduces the objectives & significance and data source & methodology, attempts to make literature review, introduces related theories, and makes an overview of the whole structure. The next three chapters analyzes Chinese compliment speech act in detail from the five aspects mentioned above. Chapter Five discusses the deep-rooted social and cultural values embedded in Chinese compliments. The ending part Chapter Six makes a summary of the main findings, puts forwards some tentative suggestions for Teaching Chinese as a Second Language(TCSL), points out the shortcomings of present study and proposes some advice for further study in the field.