A Contrastive Study OnCompliments And Compliment Responses In Chinese And American English

Compliments are increasingly being used in contrastive studies. Compliments vary cross-culturally in their linguistic forms, frequency, distribution and responses. Based on the data provided by Jia Yuxin (1997), Chen Rong (1993), Wolfson & Manes (1980, 1981), Pomerantz (1978) and Herbert (1989), this paper compares compliments and compliment responses between Chinese and American English. The study reveals that compliments in American English are formulaic in nature and lack originality in terms of syntactic structures and lexical items while those in Chinese are much more specific and original, being realized in a wide variety of lexical terms and structures. The topics of compliments can be classified into three major types: (1) appearance or possession, (2) ability or performance, and (3) personality. The first two are more frequently visited topics in both languages accounting for the most of the compliments. With regards to compliment responses, the paper shows Americans are ready to accept the credit offered by compliments while Chinese are more likely to reject or deflect the credit, trying to be modest. Through the contrastive study, the paper concludes that the American English speaker's strategies in responding tocompliments are mostly motivated by Leech's Agreement Maxim, whereas the Chinese speaker's strategies are motivated by his Modesty Maxim. This difference is then related to difference of social values between the two cultures. Except for culture, this paper also discusses other factors such as sex, age, and intimacy that may influence people's behavior in performing compliments and responding to compliments. After the analysis of one example in which a nonnative speaker of English transferred the format of a Chinese compliment response into American English, resulting in communication problems, the author then discusses the factors that trigger such problems in communication between China and America, and accordingly puts forward some suggestions to solve those problems.