Gender Variation In American English Compliment Behavior

The present empirical study aims to examine different gender tendency in performing Americans'compliment behavior (consisting of two acts—compliment giving and responding) and at the same time shed a little light on the influence of interactants'status in affecting this speech act. A total of 348 compliment speech events, collected from naturally occurring video-materials, compromise the present data base. Studies were conducted on six levels of this speech act, namely, frequency, topic, lexical level, syntactic level, compliment strategy and compliment response strategy. The study shows that gender preferences really exist in performing this speech act, and furthermore, in some cases, gender can elicit strikingly different behaviors from the two sexes and can be taken as a good predictor in determining compliment behavior. In addition, status also proves to be another social factor affecting compliment behavior considerably.Following the above quantitative studies, tentative explanations are offered from both pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, some sociolinguistic and sociological theories are drawn on here. It is suggested by this thesis that the gender differences may partly due to the different roles men and women play in American society as well as the different perceptions of the function of compliment behavior. In most cases, females might regard compliments as positively affective, social speech act, thereby displaying solidarity and positive politeness, while men might tend to give greater weight to the referential meaning of compliments, or somehow to see them as face-threatening acts.Furthermore, this thesis makes a valuable contribution to the growing field of sociolinguistics and TESOL, by attempting real applications of the above findings in second language teaching and learning. A sample lesson is designed, with the aim to develop learners'language sensitivity and communicative competence.