A Contrastive Study Of Compliment Between China’s Dongxiang Minority Language And Lanzhou Dialect

This study aims to find out whether age and power affect the complimenting strategies by Dongxiang women and discover underlying cultural factors of Dongxiang minority. Meanwhile, the present study conducts a comparison between Dongxiang minority language (DML) and Lanzhou Dialect (LD) used in complimenting; and then explores the reasons of the similarities and differences. According to Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984). compliment consists of three parts: alerters, head acts and supportive moves. One of three parts in the head acts is compliment dominance perspective that is sorted into three categories of perspectives: speaker dominance perspective, hearer dominance perspective and no dominance perspective. The other two complimenting strategies consist of syntactic strategies and lexical strategies. Brown and Levinson (1987) propose three factors threatening face act including power, social distance and ranks of imposition between speaker and hearer. Brown and Levinson (1987) also state that the evaluating standard of cultural situations and social variables are different in various cultural backgrounds. Therefore, this study attempts to compare DML which is a kind of endangered language with LD. The research method employed in this study combines both qualitative and quantitative methods. The focus of this study is put on forms of head acts and strategies of supportive moves, ignoring alerters, used in compliment in DML, and the comparison of those in the two languages. The aim of this study is to record the complimenting strategies, and find the pragmatic features.The participants of this investigation were all native speakers in DML and LD counties of Lanzhou, China. The study include several steps:interview, design of situations, role-play and video record, design of DCT, pilot study, revision of the questionnaire and large-scaled questionnaire survey. The role-play video recordings were employed as a source of semi-natural language materials for the DCT questionnaire design. After the final questionnaire was fixed,260villagers in Suo nanba and260villagers in Gaolan county were randomly selected to do the questionnaire under the help of Dongxiang translators. The participants were arranged into four groups:old women-old women group, old women-young women group, young women-old women group, young women-young women group. Among these participants,130aging over55years old and130aging from18to30years old, from the two language speakers respectively, were invited to finish the questionnaires. Totally240valid questionnaires in each language were collected in the end. With the reliable statistics, the data was analyzed and the results were discussed.The study aims to address four questions:(1) Does age affect the complimenting strategies by Dongxiang women? If yes, what does it affect?(2) What are the similarities and differences displayed in the comparison of the influence of age on complimenting strategies used by Dongxiang women and Lanzhou women?(3) Does power affect the complimenting strategies by Dongxiang women?(4) What are the similarities and differences displayed by comparing the influence of power on complimenting strategies used by Dongxiang women and Lanzhou women?The results indicated that:(1) Age does affect the complimenting strategies by Dongxiang women. Most Dongxiang women prefer to employ declarative sentences to give a compliment. Dongxiang old women adopt declarative sentences more frequently when they compliment the old but much more exclamatory sentences to compliment the young. The exclamatory sentences are barely used when Dongxiang young women compliment the old but the frequency is higher when they compliment the young. Regarding the supportive moves strategy, Dongxiang women tend to give reasons when performing compliment and the old use reasoning strategy more frequently than the young. While making inquiries is the most frequently used strategy by the young complimenting the young.(2) Similarities and differences display in the comparison of age factor on complimenting strategies used by Dongxiang women and Lanzhou women. The employment of head act strategies by Dongxiang women and Lanzhou women is quite different. Concerning the six supportive strategies, significant differences exist between group1(Dongxiang old women-Dongxiang old women) and group a (Lanzhou old women-Lanzhou old women) except for "comment" and "inquiring" strategies. Also great differences are reflected between group2(Dongxiang old women-Dongxiang young women) and group b (Lanzhou old women-Lanzhou young women) excluding uses of "thanking" and "comment" strategies. Furthermore, great differences were shown between group3(Dongxiang young women-Dongxiang old women) and c (Lanzhou young women-Lanzhou old women) except for "promise" and "comparison" strategies. It is the same case between group4(Dongxiang young women-Dongxiang young women) and group d (Lanzhou young women-Lanzhou young women).(3) Power has a great effect on the complimenting strategies of Dongxiang minority women. The more powerful complimenter uses more declarative sentences to compliment the less powerful complimentee; The complimenter with lower power has more inclination to employ exclamatory sentences to compliment the complimentee with higher power. Power has no impact on the use of thanking and inquiring strategies but does influence the use of other supportive moves strategies such as comment and reasoning strategies.(4) Similarities as well as differences display in the comparison of the influence of power on complimenting strategies used by the two nationality women. As for the forms of head act, the influences of power on adopting declarative sentences do not show significant difference; While the influences of power on using exclamatory sentences prove quite different. Considering the supportive moves, the effects of power on using comparison and comment show significant difference, but on giving thanks demonstrate similarity.To sum up, age and power do influence the complimenting strategies when Dongxiang old and young women compliment the old and the young respectively. Besides, similarities and differences exist by comparing the influence of age and power in complimenting strategies between Dongxiang women and Lanzhou women. This study finds out that the differences in compliment are due to the social cultural differences which are discussed at the end of the thesis.