Chinese Praised The Speech Act

Compliment is a kind of frequently used polite speech act, as well as the common form of spoken language relations in the daily life. It directly or indirectly attributes credit to someone, especially the listener, other than the speaker, for some superiority (achievement, ability, characteristic, appearance, possessions, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer. As the important method of social communication in people's daily life, the complimenting speech act is valued by more and more language researchers. However, most of former researches focused on English complimenting speech act, the study in other linguistic-cultural systems being so little that Chinese compliments were limitedly touched upon. Chinese is the most widely used language, and with the development of China, more and more foreigners want to learn Chinese. As the major part of Chinese, the complimenting speech act is necessary to be studied. In this paper, based on the results of previous studies, has collected compliments from movies and teleplays, which are influential works since the May Fourth Movement. And this paper conducts a more thorough and comprehensive investigation in Chinese compliments from five perspectives (topic distribution, speech patterns, responding strategies, influencing factors, and social functions).The results indicate:The topics of Chinese compliments mainly fall into four categories: achievement, ability, characteristic, appearance, and possessions. And the first two of them are the more frequently used topics in Chinese. With the social development and the change of people's thinking, some of the topics are also gradually changing in Chinese compliments, such as the topic of compliment for the fat is being replaced by the thin. In speech patterns, both Chinese compliment and English compliment can be regarded as formulaic, but Chinese compliment has its unique pattern:attention, referred to the advantages and auxiliary words. There are four responding strategies in Chinese compliment:reassignment, disagreement, no acknowledgement, and acceptance. Reassignment and disagreement are more common used in Chinese compliments, but with the increasingly frequent international communication, the Western type of acceptance is also becoming popular in Chinese. Chinese compliments' influencing factors mainly fall into five aspects:status, relation, sex, age, and cultural context, among which the influence from sex is more obvious. In aspect of social function, Chinese compliments and English compliments have some similar functions:appreciation, greeting, start talking, thanks, congratulations, encouragement, flatter and so on. Besides that, Chinese compliments have its unique function. It can remind and satirize others.