A Study Of The Variation And Change Of Chinese Compliment Responses

Compliment as a polite speech act is widely used in human daily communication. Notonly does it shortens the social distance between each other, but also conveys wonderfulemotions and maintains a good interpersonal relationship. As the change of time, the socialand economic changes and dynamics of language itself, compliment and its responses areconstantly changing.The present study will investigate the change and variation on compliment responses of100different gender, age, education level of Chinese native speakers in Xiangtan area underthe context of Chinese, on the theoretical guidance of politeness principle and variation theorythrough ways of tape-recording and observation in daily life. The data will be analyzed byGoldvarb X and Excel (2003) from a distributional analysis.The present study will discuss three questions through comparing its collected data aboutcompliments and their responses with Jia Yuxin’s data in1997. Firstly, the overall distributionof the Chinese compliment response will be pointed out. Secondly, the changes ofcompliments and compliment response will be revealed specifically. Thirdly, differences ofcompliment response in age, gender, educational level group will be studied.The results show the changes in compliment lexicons, syntactic patterns, complimenttopics and compliment responses. In compliment lexicons, people still tend to use moreadjectives and adverbials to make a compliment, but the proportion of using verbs increasegreatly. In terms of compliment syntactic patterns, while the major syntactic patterns ofcompliments (Your NP ADV/ADJ) are not changed significantly, but the proportion hasdeclined. Syntactic patterns, such as I (ADV) like NP are used increasingly. On complimenttopics, compliments in appearance account for the main proportion, which is totally differentfrom previous study. On compliment response strategy, people are more likely to chooseacceptance strategy and the non-acceptance strategy has the least users. Meanwhile, thedifferences in social variables such as gender, age, education level have certain influence onthe choice of compliment response strategy. Almost half men and women tend to acceptcompliments directly. However, more men than women choose non-acceptance strategy. Indifferent age groups, the three age groups all use acceptance most. But the old group is stillfond of choosing non-acceptance strategy than the other two groups. Among differenteducational level groups, college and above education level groups use more acceptancestrategy than the high school and below high school groups. Below high school group has thehighest frequency in using non-acceptance response strategy. The change of Chinese compliments and compliment responses is mainly influenced bythree aspects: traditional conception, culture and society. On the one hand, the present studyon the change and variation of Chinese compliments and compliment responses enables thesecond-language learners to have a more fully understanding of Chinese polite speech act andnorms; on the other hand, it helps to enhance Chinese people’s ability of cross-culturalcommunication.