A Contrastive Study Of Compliments Between English And Chinese Speakers In Literary Works

Compliments are positive speech acts that express friendship and increase rapport among people. As a universal phenomenon, compliments play a very key role in communication. It is not only language-specific, but also culture-specific. The previous studies of compliments have shown that this speech act set is actually more complicated and revealing than it appears, in terms of the relation between language, society and culture.This paper is a contrastive study on the use of compliments in English and in Chinese. The paper presents the similarities and differences between English and Chinese compliments from the following aspects: compliment topics, formulae, responses and functions. I compared two great literaryworks. One is the Chinese famous writer Lao She's drama Teahouse and theother is the English novelist Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The formerrepresents the culture of old Chinese society and the latter represents the culture of 19th century English society. Therefore, in this paper, we are attempting a deeper study and research from cross-cultural perspective on this subject.All the findings are related to the assumption that there are similarities and differences between the two cultures. They are influenced by their respective cultures, thoughts and histories. The breakdowns of cross-cultural communication may occur if people from one culture impose their own principles and criteria of compliments on the people from another culture.Finally, compliments will change with the development of the society and globalization...