Chinese And English Compliments Comparative Study In The Chinese International Education

Complimenting is a kind of positive speech acts that is highly and frequently used in human communication, said to be a social "lubricant", which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to the receiver, usually the person addressed or referred, for some "good" (possessions, characteristics, skills, etc.). A compliment is able to maintain and strengthen the interpersonal relations between the addressor and the addressee, improving the communication effect eventually. There are lots of compliments both in Chinese and English, which have special communication models, functioning as greetings, thanks, encouragement and starting a topic. Although extensive researches on compliments have been done abroad, researches in this field in China started very late, which are normally limited to preliminary introductions of English compliments study. Systematic and overall considerations about Chinese compliments are lack, and the cross-cultural study of compliments in English and Chinese is even less.Actually compliments are related to various aspects of the social culture. This kind of speech act is fit to be studied in comparison method which makes us easy to observe and understand the difference and similarity in the related culture and to avoid any misuse of the compliments or any pragmatic faults, especially for the language learners.The paper consists of seven parts.Chapter One demonstrates the reason, objectives and the significance of the cross-cultural study of Chinese and English compliments. Chapter Two makes the review of the Chinese and English compliment speech act study at home and abroad. Chapter Three states the applicable theories in the paper which are speech act theory and politeness principle.Chapter Four, Chapter Five and Chapter Six discuss respectively the semantic and syntactic structure, the topic distributions and responding strategies of Chinese and English, making the related cross-cultural comparison study in the above mentioned respects.Chapter Seven draws the conclusion of the paper, summarizing the paper and points out to start teaching compliment speech act in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages. It addresses its academic limitations and expects its further research in the future.The research shows that both Chinese compliments and English compliments can be interpreted as formulaic on basic syntactic level and semantic level. In English very limited syntactic and semantic structures are employed to express compliments, and so are in Chinese. But they differ greatly in semantic level. The compliments in both Chinese and English focus their topics on four aspects as appearance, achievement and ability, possession and trait though they are different in preferred ones. These existing differences are caused by the respective history and culture. There are obvious differences in the responding strategies. English native speakers intends to emphasize " to agree with the addressor" but Chinese native speakers prefer turning down or belittling themselves. Furthermore, Chinese native speakers usually interpret complimenting the possession as demanding for the complimented one by the addressor, while English native speakers normally regard this kind of response as a face threat and then feel strongly embarrassed. In fact, the research shows the different complimentary responding strategies of Chinese and English follow the respective Leech's "Modesty Principle" and "Praise Principle" accordingly. Both strategies reflect the modesty and politeness in a way. Since a learning process of a second language is one of socialization, the effective communication is the finally pragmatic aim for the learners besides obtaining the language fluency through learning and practicing the linguistic forms, the paper proposes that Chinese compliment speech acts should be taught in teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages which helps to improve the communication effect definitely.