A Study Of Compliments From The Perspective Of Discourse Strategies

Mark Twain says that, "I can live for two months on a good compliment." Therefore, one can find that compliment is indispensable to people's daily life. The act of complimenting is a common but very important kind of communicative language which incarnates many different functions in verbal communication. Paying someone a compliment can be a very natural practice for some people. However, many people may find that giving a compliment is not as easy as it appears. The study of compliments has aroused plenty of attention and its related studies have sprung up. However, having scanned these studies, one may find that these scholars have just shed attention to comparative studies on different languages of compliments, such as English and Chinese, Japanese and English, Thai and English, etc. from a cross-cultural or pragmatic perspective and investigated into items like complimenting act, compliments responses, topic distribution, semantic and syntactic patterns and gender difference, etc.Having the foundation on the relevant researches of compliments, this thesis is dedicated to deepening the study of compliments from the perspective of discourse strategies. And its relevant theoretical framework is consisted of prosody in conversation and context of discourse. The essential items to be addressed in this thesis contain the followings: the effect of compliments differentiates even with a slight change of prosodic features such as stress, intonation and paralinguistic features; the exactly same compliments in daily life can change its meaning under different contexts; how compliments are transformed as discourse strategies and play the corresponding roles in the successful realization of communicative purposes under different features of prosody and context.Through discussing and analyzing compliments in verbal communication with a combination of theories of prosody and context, this study has strived to uncover how stress, intonation, paralinguistic features and context have effects on people's usages and understandings of compliments. And after exploring the differentiation of compliments under discourse strategies it has proposed some relevant strategies which set a good example for people's complimenting acts and make compliments serve better for the interpersonal communication.