A Contrastive Study Of Compliment Responses Between Chinese And American English

Compliments are frequently applied in social communication. It has been viewed to"grease the social wheels"and to"serve as social lubricants"(Wolfson,1983:89), which is primarily aimed at maintaining, enhancing, or supporting the addressee's face (Goffman, 1967). Compliment has the structure of"an adjacency pair operation"(Schegloff & Sacks, 1973:296) or"action chain event"(Pomerantz, 1978:109-110), which must have its response. It involves many social and cultural factors. Sociolinguistics claim that compliment and its response can be affected both by cultural factors and social factors including social status, gender, age, etc..The present study compares between Chinese and English compliment responses from the cultural factor to find their similarities and differences. Compliment response has its own universal strategies which both Chinese and Americans share. There are two main strategies, one is Acceptanace and the other is Nonagreement. However, owing to their respective traditional cultures, the proportions of those two responses are quite different. Chinese, affected by Confucianism deeply, value the collectivism as the core of their culture. They are educated to be modesty and reserved. So when confronting with compliments, most of them will respond with rejection to obey the social norms. By contrast, Americans, shaped by their unique historical impacts, highly advocate individualism. They harbor totally different ideas of modesty. Among all the compliment response strategies, Acceptance is the most frequently used one in order to show their courtesy. Culture influences a lot on gender variable, so comparing study on compliment response from a cultural perspective. It should consider the gender, which cannot be left out. So in this paper, the researcher also analyzes that how gender variable influences the response of compliment in both cultures and presents its two main reasons.The resource data of the study come: firstly, from the corpus of compliment-compliment responses interchanges in the United States by Pomerantz and Herbert; secondly, collected by the author from the conversations in the daily life (see Appendix A); thirdly, from the author, by making use of Discourse Completion Test (DCT) on Chinese and American English compliment responses (see Appendix B for detail). A total number of 228 compliments were collected for Chinese data and 125 for American English data.From the discussion of the similarities and differences of both languages compliment response from the cultural contrastive study, this study sheds light on the cross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching and learning.