An Investigation Into The Difference Of Compliment Strategy And Compliment Response Strategy Between English Majors And Non-english Majors

Compliment speech act, frequently-used and well observed in daily communication, hasbeen one of the important issues of applied linguistics in the last few decades. As a means ofestablishing, maintaining and enhancing the solidarity of interpersonal relationship, it is oftencompared to the “lubricant” of social communication. Compliment speech act is composed ofcompliment and compliment response. Scholars at home and abroad have focused theirattention on compliment speech act in various fields, such as pragmatics, discourse analysis,sociolinguistics and cross-cultural communication. A considerable amount of research hasbeen carried out on compliment speech act in terms of syntax, topic and strategy as well asgender and age difference. Compared with the related studies abroad, few intensive andcomprehensive studies are done at home, especially from the perspective of the influence ofEnglish learning on Chinese.Based on the framework of speech act theory, politeness principle and pragmatic transfer,this thesis intends to investigate the differences in compliment strategy as well as complimentresponse strategy between English majors and non-English majors from the perspective of“borrowing transfer”. The present study intends to answer the following questions:1. Is there any difference in compliment strategy between English majors andnon-English majors? If any, what is it?2. Is there any difference in compliment response strategy between English majors andnon-English majors? If any, what is it?3. Why are there differences in compliment speech act between English majors andnon-English majors?This thesis adopts the methodology of quantitative study combined with qualitativestudy. The questionnaire survey of Discourse Completion Task (DCT) is conducted and thecollected data are analyzed quantitatively through Chi-square test and interpretedqualitatively. The research result shows that, in terms of compliment strategy, English majorstend to use more explicit compliment than non-English majors, whereas non-English majors tend to use more implicit compliment than English majors; and that in terms of complimentresponse strategy, English majors are more likely to adopt agreement strategy, whereasnon-English majors tend to employ modesty and harmony strategies. Qualitatively, the resultscan be reasonably explained by the “borrowing transfer” that English culture make greatimpact on Chinese English majors and their compliment speech act is closer to that ofwesterners.This thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter1is a brief introduction of the presentstudy including the research background, motivations, objectives, significance and theorganization of the thesis. Chapter2gives a general review of the definitions of complimentand compliment response and also summarizes the previous studies on compliment speechact. Chapter3focuses on the theoretical framework of the thesis including the speech acttheory, politeness principles and pragmatic transfer. Chapter4provides the research questions,subjects, instrument, data collection, data codification and analytical procedures. Chapter5discusses the research results in terms of compliment and compliment response from theperspective of “borrowing transfer”. Chapter6is the conclusion part, in which the majorfindings and the limitation of the present study are presented and some recommendations arealso given for future research in this area.