A Contrastive Study On Compliments And Compliment Responses Between Wei Cheng And Its English Version Fortress Besieged

This paper attempts to make a contrastive study on compliments and compliment responses between the Chinese novel Wei Cheng and its English version Fortress Besieged based on the speech act theory and politeness theories. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are involved in this case study.As an important speech act, complimenting is said to be a social lubricant, which is frequently applied in social communication to explicitly or implicitly attribute credit to the receiver, usually the person addressed or referred to, for some'good' Giving appropriate compliments and compliment responses can not only serve to negotiate social relations, but also establish solidarity and harmony between the speakers. Thus, compliments and compliment responses have drawn great attention of many linguists for the last two decades, and extensive studies on them have been done from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Most of these empirical studies focus on compliments and responses in oral language. However, there are few researches based on the written language. Especially, compliments and compliment responses in literary works are ignored. In addition, translation of compliments and compliment responses between Chinese and English in literary works has also been untouched in the previous studies.This paper chooses the famous Chinese novel Wei Cheng and its English version Fortress Besieged to do the case study on compliments and compliment responses. Among numerous Chinese novels, Wei Cheng is considered the greatest work in the 20th century. Its English version Fortress Besieged is also widely acknowledged and appreciated. Compliments and compliment responses are rich in Wei Cheng and Fortress Besieged, and have their characteristics, which have not been studied before.Through investigation of compliments and compliment responses in Wei Cheng and its English version Fortress Besieged, some findings are concluded. Firstly, from the lexical level, positive semantic carriers in CCs and ECs are both highly formulaic, but there exist differences in frequency distribution of different kinds of positive semantic carriers. Adjectives are the most frequently used in both CCs and ECs in the novels. However, ECs are more reliable on adjectives to express complimentary meaning than CCs are. Adverbs are less frequently used alone to show positive meaning in both CCs and ECs. However, adverbs are often used as intensifiers to modify adjectives or verbs as positive semantic carriers. Adverbs as intensifiers are more often used in Chinese than in English. In CCs, the second frequently used positive semantic carriers are ritualized phrases. These ritualized phrases seldom have equal ones in English for their unique cultural connotation. Usually, they are translated into adjectives or nouns to show their complimentary meaning. Secondly, it is found that both CCs and ECs have fomulaicity in syntactic formulation of compliments. However, since Chinese is a paratactic language while English is a hypotactic language, there exist some differences in syntactic forms and their frequency distribution. As for translation of compliments between Chinese and English, the change of syntax should be dealt with flexibly. Thirdly, it is found that denigrating and disagreeing are the most frequently used strategies in compliment responses in Wei Cheng, which supports Gu's politeness principle. The English version adopts foreignization to deal with the cultural shock in translation of compliment responses between Chinese and English. From the perspective of cross-cultural communication, this paper appreciates foreignizing translation for it can express the original meaning more faithfully and promote the cultural exchange.Through this contrastive study, this paper aims to provide the insights for the study of compliments and compliment responses in literary works. Furthermore, it is expected to offer some help to deal with cultural shock in compliments and compliment responses between Chinese and English, and to achieve better cross-cultural communication. It can broaden our horizons and enable us to make an appropriate evaluation of different languages and cultures. This paper also explores some problems in translation of compliments and compliment responses between Chinese and English in novels, in order to give some advice and instruction to translators and language learners.This paper is divided into six chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction about the motivations, approaches, purposes and significance of the study and the organization of this paper. Chapter two reviews the previous studies of compliment and compliment response both at home and abroad, and some background knowledge and previous studies of Fortress Besieged. Chapter three focuses on the theory framework, where the related theories are presented and expounded to provide insights into this study. They are speech act theory and politeness theory. Chapter four introduces the methodology used in this study and the procedure of data collection, and proposes the specific research questions. Chapter five makes a contrastive study on compliments and compliment responses between the Chinese novel Wei Cheng and its English version Fortress Besieged. Data is selected and analyzed in three aspects, which are semantic carriers, syntax and compliment responses. The last chapter concludes the major findings, limitations of the study as well as some suggestions for further research.