Contrastive Study Of Compliments In English And Chinese-From The Perspective Of Cross Culture And Pragmatic Vagueness

Compliment is a 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.) Regarded the compliment as the subject of the thesis because Chinese and English abounds in compliments, which are used to greet, thank, congratulate, encourage, others, to open a conversation and to erase conflicts, etc. and they are frequently applied in social communication. However, studies of compliments and compliment responses have shown that this speech act is actually far more complicated than it appears in terms of the relation between language, society and culture. But each nationality has their own culture and the language that are different from other nationality's, the different languages receive the influence of each culture. The compliments therefore have their own national performance patterns and the contents. There are some differences in the function, object and restriction factor which performancing the bright national characteristics. West countries and Chinese belong to the different nationalities, therefore it exists so many differences in the aspects of compliment usage and reply.The studies of compliments in English and Chinese are drawn attention by many scholars, most of the research is based on the semantic and syntactic levels or some limited pragmatic levels. In the basis of some scholar's former research, this thesis planned to comprise the form and reply in English and Chinese compliments from the cross cultural and pragmatic vagueness respective, thus pointed out that the pragmatic vagueness function of forming and fulfilling the compliments in English and Chinese. From the thesis, we know that in the cross culture exchange, it is not enough to only master the language, and the more important thing is to be familiar with the culture behind the language. This article has also analyzed the misunderstandings and reasons caused by different cultures. This is a very important point in cross cultural communication and the foreign language teaching.