A Study Of The Role Of Age And Education In The Compliment Response Strategies Of Chinese Native Speakers

While compliment giving(CG)and compliment response(CR)have been studied in relation to many social factors,such as gender,age,educational background,and social status,few systematic studies have been done on the effect of education and age on Chinese CR strategies.This study aims to investigate the role of Chinese native speakers' educational background and age in their CRs in the Chinese context.Considering the importance to control variables and the participation of low-educated aged people,this study adopts oral discourse completion tests(DCTs)to collect data.The DCT questionnaire consists of four conversational situations designed to elicit responses to compliments,about appearance,possession,ability and personality respectively.Finally,852 occurrences of the CRs of 213 participants from four different groups,namely,the high-educated aged group,the low-educated aged group,the high-educated young group and the low-educated young group,have been collected.Since the compliment recipient may show acceptance,part acceptance/rejection,no acceptance/rejection,or rejection when responding to compliments in our data,the CR strategies are analyzed under Xia et al's(2017)taxonomy of Acceptance,Mitigation,Deflection/Evasion and Rejection.To better explain the data,a further interview was done on 6 or 7 participants in each group.The results of the study indicate that:1)age is of greater strength in determining the selection of CR strategies of Chinese native speakers than education.Youngsters receive more influence from western culture,and they have a stronger awareness of the individual and self-oriented image,so they are more likely to accept compliments than elders;2)with the increase of age,education plays a less and less important role in people's adoption of CR strategies.But generally speaking,high-educated participants tend to accept compliments more frequently due to more exposure to western culture,more confidence,and a stronger awareness to attend to others' face.