A Study Of American University Students’Strategies Of Compliment Responses

Compliment is seen as "social lubricant", which could not only express praise and admiration to others, but also shorten the social distance between people. People who are complimented also compliment others. It is important for them to response correctly. Nowadays, with the continuous development of China’s economy and society, more and more foreigners come to China to study and work. It is very beneficial for them to control the Chinese compliment and its response strategies in daily life.In the past four decades, the response of compliment has become the focus of research which has been involved in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cross-cultural communication and other fields. But most of the survey scenarios were set in the English context, while the research in the Chinese Context is still inadequate. In this paper, the theories and methods of social linguistics will be put into practice, which helps describe the tendency of American university students’ compliment responses in Chinese and analyze why they have differences. In the end the suggestions of compliment teaching will be put forward.This study is based on speech act theory, the principle of cooperation, politeness, gender differences theory and pragmatics transfer theory, which aims to analyze the condition of American university students’compliment responses in Chinese. The research establishes two kinds of variables:the social independent variables and the linguistic dependent variables Social independent variables include gender and Chinese proficiency; Linguistic dependent variable is the strategies of compliment responses. There is a systematic interaction between the two associations.In this paper, four research questions are presented:1. What is the overall tendency for American university students’ responses to compliments in the Chinese context?2. Do men and women respond to compliments differently? If so, what are they?3. Do people of different levels of Chinese proficiency respond to compliments differently? If so, what are they?4. To analyze the reason why they have different responses and try to provide some advice for compliment course teaching.This study adopts a longitudinal approach. There are altogether70participants with different levels of Chinese proficiency for this study. The data are collected through a combination method of Discourse Completion Task(DCT), retrospective interview and natural observation. The produced data are analyzed quantitatively with the aid of the chi-square statistical tool. When significant tendencies are identified, they would be interpreted qualitatively in a pragmatic point of view.The results suggest that1. American university students choose compliment responses of receiving are far more than the rejected; explicit acceptance is the preferred strategy.2. In natural communication, they start to use explicit acceptance and indirect refusal strategy.3. More women tend to explicitly accept and indirectly refuse; while more men likely to implicit acceptance and direct refusal.4. Compared with the students who are high level of Chinese proficiency, the initial ones can’t use different strategies other than explicit acceptance strategy, while the mediate level students may make mistakes by using two strategies not correctly.In addition, some sociolinguistics and pragmatics related theories are used to analyze why American university students have different responses. Different cognitive information processing leads to the result that the questionnaire survey and interviews, nature observation data differ; human postnatal growth of Asian cultural environment is the main cause of gender differences; while the duration of second language acquisition, pragmatics transfer factors will affect the level of American students of different Chinese compliment responses.As a study to address the compliment response speech act among the American learners, it renders a new perspective to the studies of compliment responses and its findings have valuable implications for the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.