A Cross-cultural Comparative Study Of Compliments In Chinese And American Sitcoms

With the increasing frequency of international communication, it has become more and more urgent to improve people's cross-cultural communicative competence. Compliment is a"polite speech act"that frequently occurs in people's daily verbal interaction. However, in the present globalizing world, people who have different cultural background sometimes may misunderstand each others'compliments, and even be confused of how to give and receive a compliment properly. This study mainly summarize and analyze the similarities and differences of compliments in both Chinese and American sitcoms to reveal the different cultures of the two nations with a purpose of help increasing the awareness of cultural factor in Teaching English as Foreign Language (TFL), thereby improving cross-cultural communications.Directed by speech act theory and the related politeness theory, based on the collected data, this paper centers on a pragmatic comparison and analysis of compliment speech act in the chosen Chinese and American sitcoms with an attempt to find out how to give and accept compliment appropriately in the two different cultural backgrounds. Altogether 12 sitcoms are chosen, 6 Chinese sitcoms and 6 American sitcoms respectively, which were produced from the 1980s up to the present. The chosen sitcoms cover ordinary family life, friendship and love life of young people, growing up experiences of teenagers and so on. Totally 300 items of compliments are collected from the sitcoms, 150 items of Chinese compliments (hereinafter CC) and 150 items of American compliments (hereinafter AC).By analyzing Chinese Compliments and American Compliments in terms of semantic and syntactic patterns, topics chosing and stratigies of responses, the author presents the findings that both Chinese Compliments and American Compliments have formulaic patterns in semantic and syntactic, topics and responses: formulaic semantic and syntactic patterns; topics focusing on appearances, possessions, achievements and abilities; high frequency of limited response formulas. Both Chinese Compliments and American Compliments, however, have their own peculiar emphases. Chinese Compliments have more ritualized and rhetorical phrases related to Chinese culture, whereas American Compliments remain in the range of limited adjectives and verbs. Chinese Compliments often use the topics of achievements and abilities, while American Compliments concentrate more on the topics of appearance and possessions. In addition, there are some differences between Chinese and American Compliments concerning responses to compliments. More indirect responding strategies such as No Acknowledgement and Praise Downgrade are used in Chinese Compliments, whereas strategies of Accepting and Returning are more frequently used in American Compliments.? In this study, the compliment responses of native Chinese speakers, who are typically regarded as having rules of speaking and social norms very di?erent from those of Westerners, is compared closely with that of native American English speakers to see if it can provide evidence to support the findings of Manes and Wolfson.While both in Chinese and American sitcoms, compliments are employed to extend greetings, show encouragement, extend gratitude and open up a new topic, differences do exist in terms of formulas, topics, and responses, which may be caused by the cultural differences betweeen them. The study of these differences can help to understand the cultural backgrounds so as to improve the cross-cultural communicative competence, particularly the competence of giving and receiving compliments appropriately in cross-cultural situations.