A Diachronic Study On Chinese And American English Compliments Of Sino-U.S. College Students

There is no doubt that the topic of compliments and compliment responses has become one of the hottest issues discussed in the scope of synchronic linguistics since the 1970s. Compliments have been said to "grease the social wheels" and thus to serve as "social lubricants" (Wolfson, 1983:89). Since Pomerantz studied compliments for the first time in 1978, almost three decades have passed. The present study aims to investigate the up-to-date information about compliments and compliment response strategies from a diachronic perspective in the aspects of compliment lexicons, compliment syntactic patterns and compliment response strategies.The present study takes the Theory of Linguistic Adaptability proposed by Verschueren (2000) as the main theoretical foundation and consults the Cooperative Principle by Grice (1967) and the Politeness Principle by Leech (1983) to examine the latest changes of Chinese and American English compliments and compliment responses. In this study, a discourse completion test (DCT) is adopted to give out questionnaires to Chinese and American college students to collect data. The questionnaire consists of two versions which are respectively designed in Chinese and English. There are 16 questions in the questionnaire: S1-S8 is involved how to compliment other people and S9-S16 is about how to respond to compliments. Altogether, 60 Chinese college students and 60 American college students participate to complete the questionnaire and they respectively come from 3 universities in Xi'an city of China and Michigan State University in the United States. As a result, there are 480 compliment and compliment response sequences which are finished respectively in Chinese and English. The main study results could be summarized as follows:(1) The occupied percentage of words in Chinese and American English compliments has changed, and the simple nouns with positive meaning are frequently adopted. Besides, some new words tend to replace the traditionally accepted words to express the positive evaluation.(2) There are some new tendencies in Chinese and American compliment syntactic patterns, though the most frequently used patterns keep the same, their proportions have decreased. Such patterns as (ADV) ADJ NP and ADV ADJ that are easy to handle begin to be favored.(3) Chinese and American English compliment response strategies demonstrate some changes compared with the previous study. People are more willing to accept what they have been complimented and give compliments to the interlocutor in return. The frequency for Chinese college students to compliment others is increasing. Though the strategies they adopt to respond to compliments are influenced by the relationship between the speakers, the present study results show the absolute majority of Chinese college students (81.7%) and American college students (88.3%) tend to accept compliments.There are several factors leading to the changes of compliments and compliment responses, including the development of society, the change of culture and the different values held by Chinese and American people. Understanding such changes can promote the intercultural communication between the two countries and on the basis of acquainting each other's cultural backgrounds, Chinese and American people will surely establish harmonious relationships in the process of communication, which will definitely further promote the communications between Chinese and American people.