An Empirical Study On Compliment Response Strategies Of BJTU Students

Compliment is a speech act which happens with a high frequency in our daily lives, which indicates that responding to compliments is a common feature of discourse activities.Not only can compliments serve to negotiate social relations,but also responses to them can establish solidarity and harmony between,the speakers.This study investigated compliment response strategies employed by students from Beijing Jiaotong University(BJTU) as well as the gender and social status preference for the strategies of compliment responses,in order to meet the inadequacy of previous study on Chinese compliment responses.The study was carried out through the use of Discourse Completion Tests(DTC), in which 10 daily tife situations were described in details.100 college students from BJTU were asked to offer their compliment response they found socially appropriate. Their responses were categorized by Herbert(1989) compliment response taxonomy, calculated for frequency occurrences,and analyzed through Leech's(1983) politeness principle and Brown and Levinson's(1978,1987) face-saving view.The study also examined whether gender and social status has something to do with the participants' preference for employing different compliment response strategies.In additional,the findings and results of the present study were compared with those in the western language and Chinese.The results indicates that BJTU students' estimation with reference to the Chinese socio-culture norms of politeness appears to stay in a transitional period,a tendency from the Modesty Maxim to the Agreement Maxim,whereas the previous studies on Chinese exhibited dissimilar formulaic dimensions:the Modesty Maxim is laden much heavier value than the Agreement Maxim.Gender is an important social factor affecting college students' compliment responses.The male students prefer to employ Praise Upgrade as their first choice when performing complimenting speech acts with male counterparts,in order to show their friendship by utilize humorous and exaggerating manners.In term of female college students,they are in favor of Appreciation Token. What female college students concern is to satisfy the complimentee's positive face wants,regardless of sacrificing their own negative face wants.Social status also plays an important role in the preference of compliment response types.There were differences of compliment responses in the situation in which the complimenter is of equal status and of higher status.To sum up,college students are more likely to accept compliments than to reject them,which reflects their integration and assimilation to the western cultural values and norms as well as their intentions to maintain and enhance their social solidarity.