A Pragmatic Study Of Compliments In Chinese And English Business Contexts

Compliment,as a frequently-used speech act,incarnates different social and cultural values.For many years linguists and researchers have done a large amount of study on the cultural difference of this speech act,but few studies have explored the impacts of power relationship and interpersonal distance on this speech act.This paper discusses about the impacts of power relationship and interpersonal distance on compliments and compliment responses in Chinese and American business contexts.Compliment topics,syntactic patterns of compliments and strategies of compliment responses are discussed according to Brown & Levinson's(1987) Politeness theory,Junko Baba's(1999) Politeness pattern of compliment response, and Scollon & Scollon's(2000) Politeness systems,and the cultural elements are identified.The study mainly reveals that:1.In terms of compliment topic,regardless of the power status of the complimenter,Chinese and American data are similar in that the Internal topic is much frequently used than the External topic,and generally speaking,Chinese use more Internal topics than the Americans do;if the interlocutors are equal in status, both data show almost equal distribution of Internal and External topics.2.In terms of the synthetic patterns of compliments,American and Chinese data are similar in that complimenters in higher position or interlocutors with distant relationship prefer the pattern What(a)(ADJ) NP while complimenters in lower position or interlocutors with close relationship prefer the pattern ADJ(NP).3.In terms of the compliment response strategies,American data show high frequency of positive politeness type while Chinese data show the opposite tendency. This indicates the different conception towards power relationship and interpersonal distance between Chinese and American people.The author finds that Chinese people would pay more heed to power and interpersonal relationship than the American people do.In American culture,the power factor is generally insignificant relative to social distance.This study of complimenting speech act provides reference for future research and improves the awareness of cross-cultural communication of people engaging in cross-cultural activities.