| Interlanguage pragmatics have drawn more and more attentions these days, especially those speech acts studies on cross-cultural and developmental realization patterns, among which is compliment response. Due to the different cultural background between Chinese and English, the cross-cultural studies on CR attract many Chinese researchers’attention. However, to date the developmental studies of Chinese ESL learners’CR is still rare.Based on its pilot study to brainstorm the situation of compliment occurrence and interview with native speakers, the study designs a DCT to generate compliment response from learners on campus. Then, the DCT is conducted to three groups of Chinese ESL learners—students in Grade10, freshmen and junior university students in class. The collected data is sorted according to Holmes’taxonomy in order to explore the realization as well as developmental patterns of CR in Chinese ESL learners. Certain contextual variables—social dominance, intimacy and expectation are also included in this study to reveal their influence on CR speech act.The study reveals that the overall CR realization patterns display a preference order from acceptance, rejection to evade/deflecting, with acceptance taking the lead by a large margin. The developmental tendency among the three language groups, together with findings from other studies, leads to a hypothesis that evade/deflecting strategy is last acquistional/emergency strategy among three main strategy.The independent t-test manifests that the expectation of the complimentees is a contextual factor to CR variation, with positive expectation leading to more acceptance strategies and negative expectation to more rejection strategies resulting from the interpretation of compliment as a FTA, such as sarcasm.The developmental evidence reveals that the more competent learners’language proficiency is, the less varied their CR realization patterns are. One possible explanation is the overgeneralization of English teaching in China. |
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