Implicit Compliments In Chinese

Compliments are pervasive in people's daily life.Human beings,especially Chinese people,are cautions of making compliments to others so they use some indirect compliment strategies to avoid mentioning them explicitly and maintain their relationship.There are a large proportion of implicit compliments appeared in verbal interactions.However,recent researches on compliments mainly focus on the description of explicit compliments,implicit compliments have been largely ignored.Therefore,this thesis is an attempt to analyze implicit compliments with special reference to the Diamond Dust of the Aristocratic Family from the perspective of Linguistic Adaptation Theory.There are three research questions:(1)what are the linguistic features of implicit compliments?(2)what are the pragmatic functions of implicit compliments?(3)why do people use implicit compliments rather than explicit compliments?By taking a close look at the conversations in the Diamond Dust of the Aristocratic Family,we find:(i)complimenting speech acts can be divided into two categories,namely explicit compliments and implicit compliments.Implicit compliments can be distinguished from explicit compliments through linguistic forms by examining whether those compliments belong to indirect speech acts and violate the Cooperative Principle and its attended maxims.These two conditions together determine whether a compliment is an indirect one.(ii)there are two types of pragmatic functions of implicit compliments: interpersonal function and trans-information function.The former can be categorized into several sub-types:establishing the relationship,adjusting the atmosphere(either to create humorous atmosphere or mitigate the face-threatening effects),making encouragement,showing respect and flattering others.The latter subsumes four types: showing gratitude,making refusal,making request and expressing appreciation.(iii)implicit compliments can be regarded as strategies to realize communicator's specificadaptations to the communicative contexts,including the adaptation to the mental world and the social world.It is generally the communicators' emotions,motivations,personalities and social power,social distance as well as social convention involved that attribute to the making of linguistic choices in communication.This study is of both practical and theoretical significance.On the one hand,practically speaking,it helps us realize the importance of implicit compliments and make use of them to improve communicative competence.On the other hand,theoretically,this study on Chinese implicit compliments from Linguistic Adaptation Theory can enlarge the application scope of Adaptation Theory and shed new light on the further analysis of implicit compliments.