A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Compliments From The Perspective Of Cross-cultural Pragmatics

Compliments,as a speech act,express explicitly or implicitly the speaker's praise about something good that the hearer owns.Compliments,which occur with a high frequency,are employed in a wide range in people's daily interactions.Called as the communicative lubricant,compliments can relieve the contradiction between the two sides of communication,shorten the distance of each other,and improve the interpersonal relationship.Compliments and compliment responses exist universally in different social groups and cultures as a linguistic phenomenon.However,there are some differences among different social cultures.Influenced by their own culture,compliments and compliment responses present their characteristics and contents with the national culture.Chinese and English compliments belong to different cultural systems and there are many differences in terms of their usage and responses.With the increasingly frequent exchanges between different cultures,more and more attention has been paid to pragmatic problems.Therefore,under the background of cross-cultural communication,it is helpful to use compliment and compliment responses properly if we understand the differences between them and the cultural factors that cause the differences.Cross-cultural pragmatics is a new discipline developed on the basis of pragmatics and contrastive linguistics.Cross-cultural pragmatics is a study of the pragmatic problems which appear in the process of communication carried out by people from different cultural backgrounds.More specifically,it is a cross-cultural comparative study of language activities in different cultural backgrounds.The first step in cross-cultural pragmatics is the contrastive analysis of different language superficial features.On the basis of comparative analysis,it helps us understand the differences among different language superficial means on one hand,and on the other hand,we can the cultural differences behind those distinctions.Taking cross-cultural pragmatics as the theoretical basis and the freshmen from Jilin University and the foreign students from Beijing Language and Culture University as research subjects,this paper adopts the method of questionnaire survey by using discourse completion test(DCT).Based on the questionnaires collected and previous studies,this paper makes a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English compliments from pragmatic means,pragmatic strategy and cultural aspects and tries to solve the following problems:(1)What are the similarities and differences between Chinese and English Compliments in topic distribution,vocabulary and syntactic structures?(2)what pragmatic response strategies are used in Chinese and English compliments?(3)what cultural factors cause the differences between Chinese and English compliments? Through the discussion of these problems,it is expected to help language learners cultivate awareness of cultural differences and reduce pragmatic failures in language communication.The results show that the topics of Chinese and English compliments still focus on appearance,personality,ability,achievement and possessions,but they have different emphasis.English compliments tend to focus on appearance and personality,while Chinese compliments mostly center on the ability.In the aspect of lexical distribution and syntactic structures,Chinese and English compliments are both highly formulaic,however,there are still some differences between them.Most of English compliment lexicons are adjectives and verbs.While the words used in Chinese compliments are relatively abundant.Affected by Chinese traditional culture,idioms or idiomatic expressions appear in large numbers except the conventional lexicons such as adjectives,adverbs and so on.The biggest difference between Chinese and English compliments at the syntactic level is the usage of personal pronouns.Chinese attaches great importance to Confucianism and advocates the values of collectivism and modesty,so Chinese compliments always use the second person pronouns.On the contrary,in western culture,people pursue individualism,advocate individual freedom and stress equal rights so that the first person pronouns are usually used in English compliments.In addition,both Chinese and English Compliments tend to adopt the strategy of acceptance,but the refusal strategy stillholds a high proportion in Chinese compliments.On the basis of the comparative analysis,on the one hand,it is helpful for the language learners to have a comprehensive understanding of the similarities and differences between Chinese and English compliments,and further enrich the pragmatic materials of those two languages.On the other hand,the differences between Chinese and English compliments also reflects the great differences in Chinese and western culture.These cultural differences help language learners increase the awareness of cultural differences and use compliments properly in the cross-cultural communication backgrounds so as to avoid pragmatic failures and improve pragmatic competence and the efficiency of intercultural communication.