A Comparative Study On Chinese And American English Compliment Speech Acts Of Contemporary Sino-U.S. Undergraduates

Compliments and compliment responses, as a special speech act, play a pivotal role in the study of pragmatics and even in linguistics. A compliment is a positive evaluation. It is a speech act which explicitly and implicitly attributes credit to the hearers by the speakers. It is so complex a speech act that it involves the complimenter’s personal traits and aesthetic orientation. In actual communication, a compliment is a universal language phenomenon. It has various social functions including greetings, encouragements, appreciations, opening conversations and softening criticisms. Holmes(1988a: 485) highly advocates compliments as "a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speakers, usually the person addressed, for some `good’ possession, characteristic skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer". In this highly developed information technological world, cross-cultural communication becomes more frequent than ever before, and the communication between China and America is also becoming more and more frequent. Then what will happen to Chinese and American English compliment speech acts among Sino-U.S. undergraduates? Will they present some changes? And what are the similarities and disparities between them in daily verbal communication?By using discourse completion test(DCT) as the research method, this study intends to investigate compliment speech acts employed by Sino-U.S. undergraduates respectively, compares the similarities and differences between Chinese and American English compliments and responses and analyzes the related influential factors behind these similarities and differences. This research has been conducted among two groups of subjects. The subjects in Group One are seniors from e-commerce major in Southeast University, including 50 subjects. Group Two consists of 35 American undergraduates from Jackson State University majoring in education. DCT is used to collect data to report on compliment and compliment responses employed by Sino-U.S. undergraduates. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods have been employed in the analysis process. The main study results could be summarized as follows:1) In terms of lexical features, Chinese undergraduates prefer to use adjectives and adverbs to express compliments while American undergraduates tend to adopt adjectives and verbs to pay compliments. Besides, the proportions of lexicons in Chinese and American compliments have changed, and the simple nouns with positive meaning are frequently adopted. Besides, some newly-appeared lexicons begin to replace the traditionally accepted words to express the positive evaluation. As for compliment syntactic patterns, the pattern "NP + be+(ADV) +ADJ", no matter in Chinese or in American English, plays the leading role in performing compliment speech acts. Although the mostly occurred syntactic patterns remain the same, their occupied percentage has decreased. And the compliment syntactic patterns employed by Sino-U.S. undergraduates have presented some changes. Such simple patterns as(ADV) ADJ NP and ADV ADJ begin to be favored by more Sino-U.S. undergraduates.2) In terms of compliment responses, both Chinese and American undergraduates tend to use compliments as well as compliment responses to perform the phatic function. Besides, declaratives are commonly adopted in their compliment responses. However, their compliment response strategies are different. Generally speaking, American undergraduates more often use accept strategy while Chinese undergraduates tend to accept or evade in their compliment responses. But they will adopt different response strategies, faced with different situations.3) This paper also analyses influential factors in performing compliments and responding to compliments in terms of gender, position and status, intimacy, culture and change of society, among which culture plays the leading role.Theoretically, the study makes further research into compliment speech acts and the comparison and contrast of native Chinese and American English. In practice, the study provides reference data for compliments and compliment responses in cross-cultural communication. It is expected that this study may shed some light on interlanguage pragmatics and foreign language teaching and learning.