On Gender Differences In Compliments And Compliment Responses In American English

The phenomenon of gender differences in language can be found everywhere insocial interactions. The present study will examine gender difference from the perspectiveof compliment behaviors (e.g. compliments and compliment responses). Complimentbehavior, in a sense, reflects the social structure and culture of a certain society, thusmaking it a worthy topic in sociolinguistic field. Gender, as a significant social variable,shapes individual thoughts and behaviors on one hand, and exerts influences oninteractions among individuals. On the other, gender has not been given enough attentionto in existing researches about compliment behaviors. Therefore, the present study willexplore the variable’s effect on compliment behaviors of Americans with the help oftheories in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. The research is trying to answer the followingthree questions:a. What are the gender differences in compliments and compliment responses?b. How can the research results be interpreted from both pragmatic andsociolinguistic perspectives?c. How can the findings contribute to the improvement of English learners’cross-cultural communication skills?The data of this study is collected from a famous American TV series, including580complimenting acts. The thesis will conduct the research from the perspective of lexicallevel, syntactic level, topic, compliment strategy and compliment response strategy.Results show that there are indeed gender differences on these levels.After that, the present study makes tentative explanations for the findings by usingrelated theories in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. It turns out that gender differences incompliment and compliment response are closely related to the different perceptions ofcompliment behavior.Although there are limitations in this thesis, there are actually some new findings, forexample, on the lexical level, people do not limit their five most frequent choices to good,great, nice, beautiful and pretty; an assumption is made that men put emphasis on abilitywhile women focus on personal trait.