China Youth Modest? - Compliments For Chinese Youth And Their Response Language

As an important speech act, compliment has mainly been studied in English context or compared with other languages like Chinese. However, it is seldom studied in Chinese context alone. It is believed that the Chinese people have long put modesty at first, so they seldom compliment others and avoid other's compliments. Since great changes have taken place in China during these decades, there are a number of factors which can affect people's choices of compliments and compliment responses.This thesis tries to explore the characteristics of compliment and compliment responses of the young Chinese through an open-ended questionnaire among a group of college students.The statistical results show that, there exist significant differences between men and women when they compliment or respond to compliments from others. Firstly, women tend to use more Explicit Compliments than men do, while men tend to use more Implicit Compliments or choose to opt out.Secondly, men and women also show differences in using compliment formulas.Women tend to use more adjectives, while men tend to apply more nouns.Thirdly, as for compliment response strategies between men and women, women tend to accept the compliment more frequently than men, while more men tend to avoid it. There are different reasons which can explain why males and females differ in their choices of compliments and compliment responses, like different gender statuses and education.Besides gender differences, other factors affecting the strategies of compliments and compliment responses like closeness of relationship and fashion, etc are also discussed in this thesis.It is hoped the study will shed some light on the teaching and learning of compliments and compliment responses in the Chinese context.