An Empirical Pragmatic Investigation Of Chinese Compliment Responses In Family Settings

Though compliment, as a linguistic phenomenon, has attracted great attention of many scholars at home or abroad who have conducted their researches from different respects and whose efforts are mainly concentrated on using it to explain the cultural differences and the linguistic analysis in various English countries, the study focused on compliment, especially compliment responses in Chinese context is far from being satisfactory. What s more, most of them are context-free and most scholars studied it in isolation. If we just stop at the comparison between various cultures conveyed by the complimentary usage on all occasions without probing into a specific setting, we probably will miss something valuable and informative in this field.The compliment event is such an interesting speech act that it has embodied the social norms and cultural values behind the language. Since family functions as the basic unit of society, it is the carrier of the culture. Moreover, Chinese society has been undergoing unprecedented changes in her politics, economy as well as cultural values resulted from its opening up and reform ever since 1978. All these changes should have a great impact on their language use and the language must adapt to these changes. And the family is the basic unit of the society, so it must boast of substantial modern spoken language which empowers itself as a mirror-image for power and solidarity relationship in a Chinese setting. That is why I initiate the idea of confining compliment responses into a specific family setting happened between parents and their children. The present study aims to explore the difference between family members in using compliment responses in Chinese context from an empirical perspective based on the Speech Act theory, Politeness Principles, Power and solidarity relationship theory and Adaptation theory.Five research questions were addressed: a. What is the overall tendency for the people to respond to compliments in their families? b. Do people of different gender respond to compliments in the families differently? If so, how do they differ? c. Do parents of different age groups respond to compliments from their children differently? If so, how do they differ? Do children of different age groups respond to compliments from their parents differently? If so, in what ways do they differ? d. Do parents groups respond to compliments differ from the children s group? If so, how do they differ? e. Do parents of different educational background respond to compliments from their children differently? If so, how do they differ?The researcher got the data from three ways: the data from Home with Kids, interview and natural observation. When significant tendencies are identified, they would be interpreted qualitatively from sociolinguistic and pragmatic point of view. The results suggest that, overall native Chinese speakers respond to compliments differently from stereotypically expected and there is a correlation between the respondents CR strategy choice with their gender, age and educational background. a. Chinese speakers accept compliments more often than reject them and Implicit Acceptance strategy is put into the first place; b. Mother and daughter tend to use more Explicit Acceptance than father and son do in compliment responding; c. The younger the parents are, the more Explicit Acceptance they used; the older the parents are, the more Rejection they used. The younger the children are, the more Explicit strategy they used; the older the children are, the more Implicit strategy they use; d. the children s group employ more Acceptance strategies and the parents group use more rejection strategies than the children s group; e. The more educated the respondents are, the more Implicit Acceptance they use; the less educated the respondents are, the more Explicit Rejection and Deflection they use in the families. Practically, the findings of the study have valuable implications both for cross-cultural communications and the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.The thesis is made up of seven parts. Introduction aims to provide a general introduction to the research and it has explained the reasons and significances of this research by presenting the problems in the existing studies on compliments in general, and then set aims for the present study. Chapter One offers a review of the previous researches on compliments. Chapter Two displays the theoretical framework for compliments. Chapter Three details the research methodologies used in this study, including its research design, data collection method and data coding. Chapter Four is devoted to a detailed analysis of compliments occurring in the Chinese family settings especially between parents and their children. It has been analyzed from three social variables: gender, age and educational background. Chapter Five is discussion and the general findings of the study. Conclusion summarizes the implications it may contain. Furthermore, some problems and limitations of the present study are pointed out and suggestions for further research are also sketched out.