| Compliments, which are widely used in personal intercommunication, belong toone of the polite speech acts, and they are easy to be seen in all the languages in theworld. As we all know, anytime when a compliment is given, there is usually acompliment response following. On the one hand, the former is used by people tosmooth the social intercommunication and establish and maintain the harmonioussocial relationships. On the other hand, however, as for the latter, complimentresponses given by people are different from one culture to another. According to theprevious studies on compliment responses, we can see that they are much morecomplicated than what they appear, due to many factors, which have an importanteffect on them, linguistic, social and cultural. So far, a great number of publicationshave focused on compliment responses by researchers from different fields, such aslinguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, andintercultural communication. However, there are few researches on the interculturalcomparative analysis about compliment responses between American English andChinese, though a little work has been done in Chinese. Therefore, the present paperintends to do a research on compliment responses both in American English andChinese and by contrast, further explore the social and cultural factors which areunderlying the differences between them. Besides, the valuable implications forintercultural communication and foreign language teaching and learning have beenpresented in the present thesis.Face theory by Brown and Levinson and Politeness Principle by Leech abroadis used in the present thesis, besides, Politeness Maxim based on Chinese culture byGu Yueguo also provides a theoretical function for the present research. As for themethodology, DCT questionnaire and natural observation are chosen to collect thedata needed in the research. For the present research,160native Chinese speakers and80native American English speakers participate in the DCT and80native Chinesespeakers and40native American English speakers are chosen for natural observation. The questionnaire consists of six different conversational situations in Chineseand English versions respectively. And there are three topics about compliments in thequestionnaire, including appearance, possession and abilities. In detail, the topic onappearance is organized in the first situation (a new coat), as well as in the secondsituation (a hairstyle); Situation3(a new mobile phone) and situation4(a new car)are referred to the topic on the possession; As for situation five (playing football) andsituation six (doing a job), they are about the topic on abilities. And on the other hand,in terms of the status of the complimenter, the situations are classified into anotherthree groups shown as the following. Compliments in the first situation and the fifthsituation are offered by status equals; In situation2and situation4, the complimentsare from the lower social status; The last two, situation3and situation6include thecompliments from the higher social status.What the research show us is that as the following:(1) Native American Englishspeakers tend to choose explicit agreement, especially appreciation token, whilenative Chinese speakers prefer implicit agreement and indirect rejection whenresponding to a compliment.(2) There nearly exists no difference when nativeAmerican English speakers respond to the compliments on appearance and possession,on the contrary, however, native Chinese speakers tend to choose acceptance whenfaced with a compliment on appearance more often than when responding to thecompliments on the other two topics, possession and abilities.(3) The female tend tochoose acceptance more likely than the male among native Chinese speakers.However, there is nearly no difference between the male and the female whenresponding to the compliments for native American English speakers.(4) Thoughthere is something in common, native Chinese tend to reject the compliments frompeople who are higher than themselves, however, native American English speakersstill choose acceptance when responding to the compliments from the higher status. |
