Multi-aspect Exploration On Compliment Response

Compliments are frequently applied in social communication. It has been viewed as something to "grease the social wheels" and to "serve as social lubricants" (Wolfson,1983:89), which is primarily aimed at maintaining, enhancing, or supporting the addressee's face (Goffman,1967). Linguists at home and abroad have done a lot of research about compliment in the last three decades. Most of their studies, however, focus on English language. Few works have been done in Chinese context. Thus this study is conducted.Based on Leech's politeness principle, Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness, Gu Yueguo's politeness theory and pragmatic transfer theory, this thesis aims to look into the following questions:1) What is the characteristic for modern Chinese youth to respond to compliments?2) Whether the CR strategies are different or not between English major students, non-English major students and ordinary Chinese youth.3) Whether English will bring transfer to Chinese people's use of their mother tongue interaction after they have learned English for a period of time.By making use of Discourse Completion Test (DCT) as the data elicitation method, the author took college students and ordinary Chinese youth as subjects to make an investigation to explore their CR strategies. The three groups of subjects are at different English language proficiencies:English major students are representatives with advanced English language proficiency; non-English major students are representatives with medium English language proficiency; ordinary Chinese youth are supposed to be representatives with low English language proficiency in the present study.This thesis consists of six correlated chapters as follows:Chapter one is introduction. It gives a brief introduction to the definition of compliment and compliment response, the aim and significance of this study and the layout of this thesis.Chapter two is literature review. It presents related theories and researches, including politeness theories, pragmatic transfer theory and studies of compliment responses both at home and abroad.Chapter three is research methodology. It contains research questions, questionnaire design, the subject and data collection and processing. The present study employs DCT questionnaire as the research instrument to collect data. And English major students, non-English major students and ordinary Chinese youth are chosen as subjects.In chapter four, three research questions are answered and discussed.Chapter five is the conclusion of the present study.Chapter six lists some limitations of the present study and the author provides some practical suggestions for further study.The present results indicate that modern Chinese youth employs acceptance category strategies the most frequently, evasion and non-acceptance category strategies less frequently, and request interpretation and no response strategies the least. English major students, non-English major students and ordinary Chinese youth differ significantly in several strategies. There exists pragmatic transfer from English to Chinese in Chinese people's mother tongue interaction and people with different English language proficiency employ some compliment response strategies differently. It indicates that English language proficiency does affect the choice of compliment response strategies to some extent.