The Speech Act Realization Of Compliments And Responses In English By Chinese EFL Learners

Compliments, as a kind of speech act, are quite frequently applied in social communications. A compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to the receiver, usually the person addressed or referred to, for some"good"such as possessions, characteristics, skills, etc., so it is regarded as the"social lubricant". Compliments are considered as one kind of polite speech act, and usually applied into greeting people, starting a conversation, showing respect for the listeners, congratulating the listeners for some good things and expressing the speaker's gratitude to the listeners or erasing the conflicts and so on. What's more, by using compliments, the interlocutors can establish a good atmosphere for starting and maintaining their conversation and can greatly promote communicators to obtain more effective communications.Compliments are of a long history both in Chinese and English, and play a positive role in practical social communications. However, studies of compliments and compliment responses have shown that when considered in terms of the relationship between language and culture, this speech event is actually far more complicated than it appears. Indeed, complimenting is a particularly suitable speech act to be investigated in comparative studies, as it acts as a window through which we can view what is valued by a particular culture. As such, this study was designed to analyze the similarities and differences in giving and responding to compliments by both Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers.Interlanguage pragmatics studies learners'specific pragmatic performance and its relationship to learners'mother language and the target language. More and more researchers in and abroad lay their research on the interlanguage speech act, and they have studied a number of such speech acts, such as apologies, requests and refuses. But studies focusing on examining Chinese second language learners'compliment and compliment response behavior are of relatively small numbers. The present study mainly focuses on the realization of compliment speech act by the native English speakers and Chinese EFL students. Based on the data analysis, the present study described the realizations of compliment speech act by Chinese EFL students, and through comparison of the compliment speech acts between Chinese EFL students and native English speakers, the study tends to reveal how different culture backgrounds caused the subjects to show different cultural characteristics, thus causing different compliment speech acts.The subjects consisted ten native English speakers and seventy Chinese EFL students. The first group consisted of thirty first-year EFL students and forty third-year EFL students were involved in the second group. The third group members are ten native English speakers. The data were collected through the instrument of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The questions for the DCT were designed on the basis of Yu's DCT (1999), in which compliment situations are given with gender and social status as contextual variables. After the necessary additions and some amendments, the DCT for the present study consists of fourteen situations, half of which requires the subjects to give compliment and the other half asks the subjects to respond to the given compliments.The discussion of the results begins with the overall classification of the Chinese EFL students'compliments according to Searle's Speech Act Theory (1969), and their compliment responses are categorized into different strategies based on Herbert's (1986, pp.76-88) taxonomy. The second step is to collect all features of each group on the basis of the DCT mainly by descriptive analysis to describe and analyze each group as a whole and thereby obtain a comprehensive picture. Then, based on the standard answers of the native English speakers, comparison between first-year and third-year EFL subjects'data will be made to serve as the basis for the discussion on the relationship between language proficiency and pragmatic competence. The thesis focuses on the study of Chinese subjects'compliments and compliment responses strategies for which quantitative analysis is combined with qualitative analysis to figure out realizations of their compliment speech act.The results show that Chinese college EFL learners'compliment speech act and the employed complimenting strategies have twofold characteristics: on the one hand, their compliment speech acts and strategies reflect traditional Chinese cultures and values; on the other hand, Chinese EFL learners try to follow the English social norms in their interlanguage but are still held back by their inadequate pragmatic knowledge about the target language. In terms of the usage of compliment responses strategies, there is an increasing tendency for Chinese subjects to accept a compliment with the employment of"amendment"strategy to make a balance between modesty of themselves and agreement with others.According to the analysis of the data in the present research, the native English speakers applied compliments more frequently than those of Chinese EFL students. As to the responses to compliments, the native English speakers tend to employ accept strategy, while the Chinese EFL learners tend to refuse the compliments more frequently than native English speakers. This is due to the different cultures between China and the west: in order to show politeness, the Chinese people are intending to disagree or depreciate a compliment, since modesty is highly respected in the Chinese culture. While in the western culture, it is regarded to be an impolite behavior to refuse a compliment. Statistical test does not indicate great differences between Chinese college students of different proficiency levels. The Chinese EFL students of lower proficiency level, when giving compliment speech acts, will apply the cultural mode/regulations reflected in their mother language using to the target language. At the same time, the Chinese EFL of higher proficiency level will also apply Chinese linguistic and cultural regulations to their use of English. This result indicates that, when there exists contrasting differences between the culture of mother language and that of the target language, there will appear pragmatic transfer and cultural transfer in the intercultural communication.The research and analysis of this study reveal the similarities and differences in realizations of compliment by Chinese EFL students and native English speakers. The research results are helpful in enhancing the research on language and culture differences in specific contexts and are of great significance in improving EFL learners'intercultural communication competence and guiding English teaching in China.