A Study On Features Of Compliments And Compliment Responses Of The Elderly

Compliments are speech acts which explicitly or implicitly attribute credit to someone other than the speaker,usually the person addressed,for some ‘‘good''(possession,characteristic,skill,etc.)which are positively valued by the speaker and the hearer.At present,the number of compliments focuses on the elderly is relatively smaller and empirical researches of compliments based on Chinese elders' dialects are very much less productive.Within the theoretical framework of Pomerantz and Herbert's compliments and compliment responses,based on the data resources of 13 elderly people from Xinhuang District of China,the present study explores the elderly people's compliments and compliment responses from three perspectives: features of compliments and compliment responses,in terms of frequency and pattern of compliments and frequency and strategy of compliment responses;the causes of compliments and compliment responses features;and the implications of compliments and compliment responses features on language practice and people who communicate with the elderly.The present study achieves the following results:(1)The frequency of compliments and compliment responses respectively reaches 66 and 45 from 686 turns;The proportion of compliments and compliment responses is 16.1 percent of all the corpuses,which indicates that the proportion of elders' compliments reaches 9.6 percent more than the proportion of compliment responses.(2)There are six types of language ontology of the elders' compliments,including Adjective modifiers(21%),Sentence extensions(14%),Affirmative markers(15%),Subjective &interpretative sentences(42%),Inverted sentences(3%)and Borrowed words(5%).(3)As for patterns features of the compliments,there are three patterns found in the corpuses: Direct compliment,Direct and Indirect compliment and Indirect compliment,and the elderly are inclined to compliment others by indirect compliment(42%).The proportion of elders' compliment responses reaches 6.5 percent.(4)There are six language ontology types of compliment responses included in Direct negative words(18%),Softened words(16%),Procrastinating words(24%),Procrastination of silence(20%),Irony words(9%),Mild deafness(13%).(5)As for the strategies of compliment responses,there are four strategies discovered in the corpuses.They are Scale down,Disagreement,Question and No acknowledgement.When it comes to the causes of compliments and compliment responses features,the elderly are not only affected by the social multi-culture of Han,Miao and Dong,but also aging obstacles.Mild deafness and search obstacles do harm to the physical functions.For implications of compliments and compliment responses features on language practice,it is conducive to protect dialects and highlight the diversity of social multi-culture in Xinhuang.For implications of people who communicate with the elderly,it not only contributes to speech care suitable for the elders' language functions but also culture cognition beloved by the elderly people.The study is conducive to protect excellent multi-culture and care the elderly with harmony interaction.The elderly people's facial expressions and movements are not well emerged.