A Comparative Study Of Compliment Response Strategies In American English And Chinese

Compliments, as a polite speech act, are frequently used in people's daily interactions. Compliments explicitly or implicitly attribute credit to someone, other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some"good"(possessions, characteristic, skill, etc.), which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer. How to give compliments and respond to them constitutes a significant part of the communicative competence of every member of a speech community. However, a great number of studies of compliment and compliment responses have shown that this speech event is actually far more complicated than it appears since it involves many linguistic, social and cultural factors. As one of the most intriguing topics of synchroniclinguistics, compliment response (CR) has received much attention from the researchers in various subfields of linguistics, such as pragmatics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, contrastive linguistics and cross-cultural communication. Most of their studies, however, focus on English; a little work has been done in Chinese context. The most significant issue is the lack of systematic and overall consideration about the cross-cultural study of American and Chinese compliment responses. The present study is thus conducted.This study approaches American English and Chinese compliment response from a cross-cultural perspective, based on the framework of speech act theory and politeness theory. The methodological framework is based on a modified version of the discourse completion test (DCT) developed by Beebe et al. (1990) [1]. The DCT consists of eight situations designed to elicit compliment responses for appearance, personality, abilities and possession. For the study, altogether 60 subjects, including 40 native Chinese speakers and 20 American English native speakers were selected from different gender, age, educational level and occupation groups, who were asked to write down the"natural"compliment responses according to the actual happening. The produced data are analyzed quantitatively with the aid of Chi-square statistical tool. This study analyzes the similarities and differences of compliment response strategies from the point of frequency of all compliment response strategies in Chinese and American English. The effects of social factors on the use of compliment response strategies are also examined. Spearman correlation tests are conducted to see how the social factors are correlated with the choice of compliment response strategies. The social factors include gender, age and educational level. The results suggest that: (1) From the point of frequency of all compliment response strategies, there are many similarities and differences of compliment response strategies in different circumstances under parallel situations in American English and Chinese. (2) There are some cultural and social constraints that govern the diverse verbal differences. This analysis also indicates that the politeness strategies are determined by the traditional thinking patterns and interpersonal relationships.The cultural differences between Chinese and English contexts are fully reflected by the differences between the two compliment sets,which help people understand the different cultural backgrounds better, hence to improve their intercultural communicative competence, especially that of how to receive compliments properly on intercultural occasions. Meanwhile, comparative studies on Chinese and American CRs are of significant implications both for English teaching in China and Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL).