An Interpersonal Pragmatic Exploration Of Implicit Compliments At Workplace

As a pervasive speech act in daily life, compliment has long been regarded as a positive politeness strategy in literature, about which some achievements and findings have been made. However, the implicit compliment(IC) has rarely been studied, especially in Chinese context, nor explored from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics. Therefore, Bolye(2000) calls for the attention to ICs in interaction. Besides, in workplace relational goals and relationship building pervade all aspects of workplace talk, and the unequal power relations, which “are subject to greater negotiation than the established relations such as intimates”(Wolfson, 1989:129-139), have less been focused on. Moreover, workplace interactions are more task-oriented. Therefore, this study is an attempt to redress the imbalance in favor of the IC, delving into its interactional and transactional functions from interpersonal perspective in Chinese hierarchy workplace context.Within Spencer-Oatey’s Rapport-Management Theory(Spencer-Oatey, 2000), this study is mainly a qualitative inquiry about ICs in workplace with support of the self-build corpus Workplace ICs. All the data are collected from two TV series, describing how a workplace newbie grows into an omnipotent leader. The main research questions are as follows:(1) What linguistic means are adopted for ICs in workplace?(2) What interpersonal functions can be realized by the linguistic means of ICs in workplace?(3) What interpersonal pragmatic effects can be achieved by these functions of ICs in workplace?The main findings are as follows:First, six types of Chinese ICs in workplace have been concluded based on the IC types in English(Bolye, 2000) and Spanish(Maíz-Arévalo, 2012) and adjustment to our own data in this context. They are:(1) comparison of a person to someone that the speaker thinks the other person might admire;(2) reference of something that a person has done and that he or she is proud of;(3) inquiry of the interlocutor about an apparently irrelevant question;(4) concealment of the complimentee or complimenter by replacing him with an individual or a group;(5) highlighting the complimentee;(6) implicitly complimenting the interlocutor’s ability in a routine way. The first three types are the same with those of English and Spanish, while the others are of Chinese uniqueness. We find that the fifth type occurs nearly 53%, which also echoes to Chinese culture such as Confucianism and Chinese politeness principals proposed by Gu(1990), and there even exists a routine way of ICs-type 6, which has already become a community of practice in this context.Second, contrary to the main functions of compliments in daily life, we find that ICs in this workplace context mainly serve as the adjunct to requests or refusals instead of just consolidating solidarity. That is to say, ICs in Chinese hierarchy workplace context are not just function for interactional usage, but mainly transactional one. Besides, it is also interesting to find that the fifth type accounts the most in the transactional function, while the third type and the sixth type do not occur in the interactional function of ICs, since these two types need more background information in the community of practice and are more risky to use in hierarchy context.Third, based on the functions and types, we found that ICs have negative effects on interpersonal relationship both in these two functions because of caring about the complimentee’s own identity face or the task itself, and ignorance of equity rights or association rights. Therefore, our findings can complement Spencer-Oatey’s(2000) view in workplace context and Thomas’s(1995) view in task-oriented context. Besides, negative effects of the interactional function of ICs even outnumber those of the transactional one, and half of the breakdown of rapport is caused by the fifth type of ICs. Last but not least, the lack of common knowledge about ICs also changes the topic of the conversation, which has no effect on the rapport. Therefore, the types and functions of ICs should be taken into consideration since different types of ICs would yield different rapport outcomes in these two functions.This study has made the following contributions. First, this study finds Chinese IC types in workplace context and its distinctive features, which is totally different from those in daily life. Second, complementary to the findings of Spencer-Oatey(2007) in workplace context, and Thomas’s(1995) view in oriented context that speakers tend to focus more on the task instead of the interpersonal relations, this study finds that caring about the complimentee’s own identity face or the task itself, ignorance of the equity rights or association rights may also lead to breakdown of the rapport in workplace in both two functions. Therefore, it supplements these two findings, which can enrich related research, and shed some light on people’s daily usage of ICs as well.