The Realization Of Compliments By Chinese Teachers

Compliment is a positively affective speech act. It can be referred to as 'a complex sociolingistic skill,' which serves to save people's faces, to increase or consolidate the solidarity between the speaker and the addressee and create or maintain rapport (Janet Holmes, 1988). In 1981 Joan Manes and Nessa Wolfson pioneered the study on compliment by examining the speech of middle-class native speakers in USA. They found that compliments in American English showed a striking regularity not only in their syntactic patterns but also in their semantic composition. Mark L. Knapp, Robert Hopper, Robert A. Bell, Janet Holmes and Donna M. Johnson continued the study from different angles or in different cultural backgrounds. Most of the scholars, however, studied it in isolation, except Johnson, who looked into the specific context of peer-review texts and considered it as discourse framing strategies on the discourse level. This paper aims to study the Chinese teacher's complimenting behavior to reveal its structure, function and effect. I collected a corpus of 183 compliments of teachers through observing or interviewing teachers and students of some primary and high schools in Guilin, Jinan and Dezhou, etc. Analyses were made on the levels of lexicon, syntax, semantics and discourse. On the lexical level, the discussion focused on the lexical items to carry the positive evaluations of compliments. It was found that adjectives, in contrast to verbs and nouns, are preferred to serve as the carriers. Compared with the findings about English compliments, the adjectives in the Chinese teaching context are more varied. The examination on the syntax of compliments revealed a similar patterned feature to that in English compliments. A special attention was paid to such mitigating devices as "I feel" and "is it right," which were considered as politeness strategies to redress the face threatening force of compliments. The semantic concern in this study was on the contents of compliments. The contents of the teacher's compliments are pre-conditioned by the task of teaching and education, so they are mainly directed at the performance, personal qualities, words or thought of students. The discourse analysis of compliments revealed six types of complimenting discourse patterns. They are one or a series of independent complimenting utterances or combinations of compliments with such expressions as new information, criticisms or directions. In the latter case, they are again politeness strategies to redress the face-threatening acts of criticizing or directing, etc. Four categories of compliments have been observed in terms of function: affirmative, heuristic, encouraging and critical. The affirmative compliment refers to the teacher's positive evaluations of students in good time according to their words, thought or actions, especially their accomplishments. It has a strong sense of inspiration, whereby the teacher can stimulate students to go on smoothly in the right way. The heuristic compliment is a type of commonly used compliment, whereby the teacher arouses students' positive emotions and enlightens their cognition so as to activate their thinking. This kind of compliment can help students solve problems on their own by developing their own resources. The encouraging compliment is very frequently used in the process of teaching and education. Through the encouraging compliment the teacher arouses students' passions and changes the teacher's and society's expectations into students' motivation or interest so as to enhance their sense of honor and responsibility and the spirit of struggle. The main characteristic of encouraging compliments is that they are full of excitement, praise and inspiration and therefore can easily yield notable results. The critical compliment is a special kind of positive evaluation, whereby the teacher endeavors to find out 'the flash of light' of students and in a complimenting way points out their shortcomings or mistakes so as to urge them to perfect themselves and make progress. As a matter of...