A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Complimenting Speech Act Between Chinese And Ameriean English

Speech act theory has made great influence on contemporary pragmatics study since it was put forward, and it has been paid great attention to by linguists and scholars. Speech act refers to the utterance that has performative function in language and communication and it generally can be divided into such acts as complimenting, apologizing, ordering, requesting, promising, rejecting, according to different aspects of the speaker’s intention. Among them, complimenting speech act is frequently used to extend greetings, show encouragement, open up a new topic and ease tensions in speech communication. It is a polite speech act existing abundantly both in Chinese and English. Nevertheless, the two nations understand and use compliments in different ways due to different cultural customs and traditional concepts. In order to avoid intercultural communicative misunderstanding due to misuse of compliments, it is necessary to make further analysis and exploration of differences between Chinese compliments and American English compliments so as to promote intercultural communication competence.There have been numerous researches on speech acts at home and abroad including studies of compliments, but contrastive studies are relatively little. Therefore, the paper is planned to conduct a contrastive study on compliments between Chinese and American English. Based on speech act theory, politeness principle and face theory, this paper is intended to build a closed corpus by choosing 8 episodes in The Voice of China Season IV and The Voice of America Season IX, to make a contrastive analysis of complimenting speech act (including compliment response) in an effort to find out efficient ways to give and accept compliments appropriately in different culture backgrounds, to dig out inherent cultural reasons for differences of complimenting speech act between Chinese and American English and to give some implications for intercultural communication.By adopting conversation and discourse analysis, the author collects and analyzes the data from the corpus with quantitative and qualitative approach, and then concluded there are certain laws to follow in compliment topics, semantic patterns, syntactic patterns and response strategies of Chinese compliments and English compliments, though they have their own focuses. As for compliment topics, Chinese compliments and American English compliments focus on performance/ability, but Chinese people make compliments more on personality or trait, while American people make compliments more on appearance/ability; as for semantic pattern and syntactic pattern, Chinese compliments and American English compliments show a certain range of regularity, but Chinese people focus on Chinese idioms, while American people tend to use verbs, and Chinese people employ "NP/PRON +V+(intensifier)+ADJ" more while American people prefer to use "I+(intensifier)+ like/love+NP"; as for response strategies, "acceptance" and "no acknowledgment" are preferential in both Chinese compliments and American English compliments, but Chinese people use more indirect responses while American people prefer more direct responses.As language is always related to culture, the differences of complimenting speech act between Chinese and American English fully show cultural characteristics of different countries. The principle reason lie in that China stresses collectivism while America focuses on individualism. The study can help people in different cultural backgrounds to understand and use compliments properly in different language environment so as to promote intercultural communicative competence.