A Pragmatic Study Of The Compliments In The Romance Of The Three Kingdoms

Compliments are lubricants in people's daily life.Piles of research have focused on it.Seldomly is the perspective on ancient Chinese context.This paper adopts data from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms to analyze compliments under the framework of Gu's Politeness Principle.This paper is to answer the tripartite research questions:(1)What are the linguistic devices that have been used by the speakers to realize compliments in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms?(2)How are compliments realized?(3)Why do the speakers use the compliments that way?After taking a closer look at the 163 pieces of compliments,we find that linguistic devices used by the speakers include adoption of explicitly positive expressions which can be further divided into two explicitly positive characters,structure with “zhen+~”,structure with “wei+~”,and culturally unique characters,adoption of linguistic devices like contrast and metonymy,and adoption of hypothetical compound sentences.In the second place,we can tell from the following clues whether compliments are realized explicitly or implicitly.Compliments are explicitly realized through explicitly positive expressions in two Chinese characters,through linguistic structure of zhen+n./n.phrases,wei+~,and through culturally unique expressions like shenren.While compliments are implicitly realized through linguistic structure of zhen+simple sentence,through rhetorical devices used,and through hypothetical compound sentences.Furthermore,compliments with attached signs can be either explicitly or implicitly realized.In the third place,compliments used under the ancient Chinese context are subjected to the constraints of two of Gu's Politeness Principle,the Self-denigration Maxim and the Address Maxim,and the Approbation Maxim and the Functional Maxim which is tentatively proposed by the author.