A Study Of Chinese Compliments And Compliment Responses Over The Past Seven Decades

Compliment is a common form of verbal communication in daily life,and it is a kind of speech act by which the speaker positively appraises to others directly or indirectly,especially to the listener,for the talent or the performance.As an important means of communication in people's social life,compliment is more and more valued by the linguistic researchers.At present,research on the compliment speech behavior mainly focuses on English compliment speech behavior,while studies of the compliment in other languages are rare,for example,in the Chinese language.The purpose of this thesis is to study the changing trends of the compliments and the compliment responses in the past 70 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China,including the trends of the compliment topics and the changes in the compliment response strategies,in order to explore the understanding of politeness and the cultural development of the integration of Chinese and the western.This thesis divides the Chinese language life of the past 70 years into three periods referring to Guo Xi(2019).Through collecting the teleplays and the novels in the 70 years,the thesis analyzes and compares the compliments and the compliment responses in the three periods of the past 70 years from the aspects of the topics of the compliments and the compliment responses strategies.Through using the Excel software,the thesis made the data tables and line graphs on the proportions of each compliment topic in these three periods and each compliment response strategy in these three periods,then analyzed the change trends and the reasons for these changes.Finally,it is concluded that with the development of society and the changes of people's thinking,the topics of Chinese compliments also gradually changed.Since the foundation of the People's Republic of China,the two topics of appearance and performance have been complimented the most in three periods.In terms of personality,it is gradually rising in three periods.As for the strategies of compliment responses,the transfer/avoidance modesty strategy has always been used the most in the three periods.The use of consistency strategyhas increased significantly in the three periods,while the rejecting strategy has been significantly decreased,and the harmony strategy was basically flat in the three periods.The reasons for these changes are summarized as the values and the trends in Chinese society.