A Study Of Gender And Compliment In Chinese With An Application Of The Appraisal System

?Gender differences associated with language have become a hot topic under discussion by most linguists since the 1970s. They focused mainly on gender differences existing in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and these internal features of languages. And they have also showed interest in gender differences in communication. The language and gender theories have evolved from the pieces of discussion to systematical dualistic opposite theories and to the recent social construction theories. This study also picks language and gender as the issue for research, and chooses Compliment language as the language resources for investigation.Compliment language plays an important role in speech act studies. Previous studies of compliment mainly focus on compliment formula, topic, strategy and cross-cultural and cross-gender studies, and have made great achievement. Most of these studies are actually based on two theoretical frameworks, one is the Speech Act theory and the other is the Politeness theory. This study makes an attempt to apply the theory of APPRAISAL system to the compliment and gender research.Systemic Functional Linguist James R. Martin raised APPRAISAL system in the 1990s. It has three sub-systems: ATTITUDE, GRADUATION, and ENGAGEMENT. This study chooses ATTITUDE and its sub-systems as the theoretical framework according to the nature of the compliment language.Two groups of subjects have been chosen to fill out the questionnaires designed for the research. Totally about 800 tokens of compliment have been collected and all have been coded and categorized within the theoretical framework. And the analysis of data serve to answer the following two research questions:1) . Do men and women differ in their choice of ATTITUDINAL resources when they perform compliment speech act?2) . Will people choose different ATTITUDINAL resources when they compliment to people of different genders? How do male and female differ in the ATTITUDINAL compliment resource choices while the receiver of the compliment is different?The findings of the research show that men and women have no significant difference in the choice of ATTITUDINAL resources when they compliment people. Men and women within the same subject group are not significantly different from each other in the ATTITUDINAL resources choice either. The significant difference is between the two subject groups. The same gender from two subject groups show significant difference as well. In terms of the gender of compliment receivers, it also true that the difference is between two subject groups, but not between men and women in the same group. These findings are explained and discussed with the reference to one recent development of language and gender theory-"Community of practice".