| The speech act of complimenting is a well established politeness strategy, for it can be observed in all languages and cultures. It plays an important role in human communication: it helps establish, maintain or consolidate harmonious interpersonal relationships and facilitate social interactions. However, compliment responses by people from different cultural backgrounds can be different. In view of such observations, this paper intends to research into English and Chinese compliment response strategies from an intercultural perspective and explore their cultural differences in hope to achieve a better understanding of them, to raise cultural awareness and to promote English-Chinese intercultural communication. Therefore, this study has valuable implications for intercultural communication and the teaching of English or Chinese as a foreign language.Brown & Levinson's Face Theory, Leech's Politeness Principle and Chinese scholar Gu Yueguo's Politeness maxims which are based on the Chinese culture provide the theoretical foundation for compliment response. According to Brown & Levinson (1978) , nearly all the speech acts are face-threatening acts, as they intrinsically threaten the face needs of hearer and/or speaker. Compliment responses pose a dilemma for the complimentee. If one refuses a compliment, s/he may threaten the complimenter's positive face. Conversely, if one accepts the compliment, s/he may threaten his/her own negative and/or positive face. This dilemma makes the compliment responses more complicated. According to Leech's (1983) maxims of Politeness Principle, different preferences for the politeness maxims may cause different compliment response strategies. Based on the Chinese culture, Chinese scholar Gu Yueguo (1992) has proposed five politeness maxims: (1) The Self-denigration Maxim; (2) The Address-term Maxim; (3) The Refinement Maxim; (4) The Agreement Maxim; (5) The Virtue-word-deed Maxim. Among them, Gu points out that the Self-denigration Maxim is the cardinal principle of social interaction in Chinese society. Chinese people usually deny the other's compliment and denigrate themselves to show that they are modest when they are complimented.Four research questions are addressed: 1. What's the overall tendency for native English and Chinese speakers to respond to compliments? Do they use different strategies? If so, in what ways do they differ? 2. Do native English and Chinese speakers employ different response strategies on different compliment topics? If so, in what ways do they differ? 3. Do people of different age respond to compliments differently? If so, in what ways do they differ? 4. Do people of different social status respond to compliments differently? If so, in what ways do they differ?The data quantified and analyzed in the research have been collected through two methods: discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire and natural observation, in which, DCT questionnaire data hold the biggest share, and natural observation data are used as a supplement to DCT questionnaire data. The DCT questionnaire is considered as a suitable research tool for this study. It can create a sound template of the stereotypically perceived requirements for socially appropriate compliment responses in the group studied. It also enables the researcher to obtain sufficient data in a relatively short period of time. The reason why natural observation is used as a research tool is that natural data collected through observation have the advantage of being authentic and close to life. The DCT questionnaire is revised on the basis of Chen (1993)'s design. The subjects are selected from different gender, age and occupation group through the method of judgment sampling for the study. DCT questionnaire data are collected from 120 native Chinese speakers and 60 native English speakers. The questionnaire covers 6 conversational situations, with one compliment respectively. The subjects are asked to write, in the blank lines provided, what they think to be the most appropriate verbal responses to the compliment. And natural observation data are from 60 native Chinese speakers and 30 native English speakers. The subjects are complimented on appearance, possession, and ability. The responses to the compliments are collected as they naturally occurred in different settings, and the respondents are completely unaware of the on-going research.The result shows that (1) In general, native English speakers are more likely to employ the Agreement strategies when responding to compliments. Among the Agreement strategies, Appreciation Token is the strategy most frequently used. Indirect Rejection is the dominant compliment response strategy for native Chinese speakers. (2) Native Chinese speakers prefer to accept compliments on appearance and possession but in many cases they are reluctant to accept compliments on ability. In contrast, response strategies are equally distributed among the three topics in English. (3) The younger-aged are more inclined to employ the Agreement strategies than the middle-aged and older-aged in the Chinese context, while there is no such distinction in English. (4) In English and Chinese, speakers tend to accept compliments from the lower and equal social status. Sometimes the strategy of Upgrade is adopted in a joking manner between status equals. These are the same in the two languages. However, when responding to compliments from the higher social status the majority of the Chinese prefer to adopt the strategies of Non-agreement, while most English speakers still employ the Agreement strategies.
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