Cultural Variation Of Chinese Women’s Compliment Responses

The dissertation is to study women’s responses to explicit compliments in Chinese milieu, in order to prove that the principles of our daily speech act are subject to cultural/social variation.Besides some commonality in compliments and responses, the present study may get some insight about:1) How do Chinese women’s responses to compliment differ from those expounded by Grice, Searle, etc.?2) What are underlying causes that lead these differences?3) What implication and significance can be uncovered in terms of intercultural communication?By examining people’s speech act of compliments and responses in their respective cultural backgrounds, the research will specifically revolve around investigation of such speech act in Chinese culture, which reveals speaker’s cultural norms in communication.The subjects in the research are classified into various groups (age, education, and region) to one explicit compliment (appearance or possession) in order to transcribe their responses and analyze the data collected. To guarantee the factuality and reliability, the research proceeded with library research, field observation and data collection (recorded speech performance and transcription in radio and television). These authentic evidence and data are closely examined and analyzed for our purpose.It is discovered that faced with explicit compliment such as appearance and property, women’s responses in Chinese culture not only follow the pragmatic principles that are correspondent with those of western peoples’ responses, but reveal Chinese cultural norms in general as well.