A Contrastive Study On Compliment And Response Strategies In C/E Interview Programs

Compliments, as a type of polite speech act, are frequently applied in social communication. It can smoothen the social communication and enables the communication to proceed in a quite harmonious and happy atmosphere. Meanwhile, compliment is a social speech act which serves many functions such as shortening the social distance between the speakers and strengthening the contact to maintain the social interpersonal relationships.Paying great attention to the comparison and analysis of complimenting behavior in the special context of interview programs, the author makes attempt to supply with a perception on how do people properly offer and accept compliments in the context of different cultures for people use compliments frequently in their daily life and personal interrelationships can be founded, maintained and even enhanced.Based on recreational interview, there are also political and commercial interview programs. The author selected 404 compliment cases in total, including 214 Chinese compliment cases and 190 English ones respectively. Then the author makes a comparison of Chinese and American compliments from a cross-cultural perspective so that similarities and differences can be found among them. The purpose is to describe the cultural common properties and differences showed by the interviewees in its corresponding field when they use different response strategies. And the significance lies in the assistance and implication for the foreign language learner to avoid pragmatic mistakes.The author presents the findings that responses in both CC and AC can be interpreted as formulaic, and high frequency of several limited response formulas appears. Furthermore, Chinese speakers often take no acknowledgement and questioning as their major strategies to respond the compliment, while English speakers often apply some direct response strategies such as accepting and returning to the social communication. The most remarkable thing is that many responses like Disagreement, Qualification, Scaling Down and Questioning expecting to occur more frequently has lower occurrence frequency. The author discovers that even Praise Upgrade is also a responding option for Chinese interviewees confronting a compliment. As a successful protection and maintenance of the face of the participants involved in the interview, returning strategy is adopted by both Chinese and English speakers.One of the differences of Chinese and English languages reflected in cultural area is the application of compliment speech. Learning those differences can do immense good to improve the intercultural communicative competence. What's more, on such occasions as intercultural communication, some knowledge about the compliment speech act could provide appropriate and correct options for compliment response.