Compliment Responses In Chinese Contexts: A Sociolinguistic Study

The major purpose of this thesis is to examine the sociolinguistic characteristics of compliment responses in Chinese contexts. The research questions are whether the execution of this speech event is affected by the social variables of social status, gender and age respectively, and if the answers are positive, and how?The data quantified and analyzed in the research have been collected through two methods: DCT questionnaires and natural observation, among which, DCT questionnaires data hold the biggest share, and natural observation data are used as a supplement to DCT questionnaires data. DCT questionnaires data are collected from 684 females and 684 males, and natural observation data are from 300 females and 282 males. The researcher devises three different sets of DCT questionnaires for students and for people who have their own jobs. Every set of DCT questionnaires consists of fifteen situations (S1-S15) for compliment responses. In the research, the dependent variable is compliment response strategy, and the independent variables are gender and age of the respondents, and social status of the interlocutors.The present research is conducted in the theoretical frameworks of speech act theory, variation theory and politeness theory respectively.The results of the empirical analysis show that in spite of some similarities among the respondents, the three social variables of the respondents, namely, social status, gender and age, do trigger some systematic variations in the respondents' choice of response strategies. The response strategy of Appreciation Tokens is consistently preferred by females, the younger, persons of higher social status. The younger, females and persons of higher social status tend to ask more Questions than the older, males, and persons of lower social status do. The strategy of Upgrade is employed sometimes in a joking manner between status equals, not betweenstatus nonequals. In addition, persons of higher social status negate the compliments they have received less frequently than persons of lower social status; and middle-aged and older respondents of lower social status give no acknowledgement more frequently than younger respondents and respondents of higher social status.