Gender Differences In Compliment Behavior And Strategy

Compliment and compliment response (C and CR hereafter) are influenced by variables such as gender, levels of education, cultural orientation and social status. Incorporating politeness theory, gender difference theory as well as intercultural communication theory, this thesis aims at interpreting gender differences in Chinese college students'speech acts, and exploring their implication to communication between cultures.With a newly constructed analytical framework, the author collects data from more than 120 non-English major students who finish the open-ended questionnaire known as DCT design. Among the 120 questionnaires, 100 of which are valid. Making use of quantitative as well as qualitative studies on the collected data, the author confirms her hypothesis and makes the following findings:1) More males prefer to choose acceptance with amendment, whereas females tend to adopt more acceptance than males.2) Females receive and give more compliments than males do. They are supportive and affiliation-oriented.3) Females tend to use more explicit compliments than males do, while males tend to use no response strategy and more non-compliments than females do.4) Females prefer to accept compliment on appearance as well as possession and compliment on the topic of appearance,possession while males prefer to engage in the topic of performance. This trend is significantly shaped by gender roles prescribed by social tradition. In intercultural communication, due to different cultural orientations complimenting and responding strategies show diverse distributions.