The Study Of Compliment Responses In Wechat Online Interlocution

Scholars of linguistics have made great contributions to exploring speech actscompliments and compliment responses since the 1980 s,like Manes,Pomerantz,Golato,Li Junru and Feng Jianghong and so on.Particularly,analysis on compliment responses has been made from different perspectives: studies on syntactic features of compliment responses;studies of the influences of different social variables(age,gender,social status and educational background and so on)on compliment responses and comparative analysis of compliment responses from the perspective of cross-culture study.Scholars have adopted various corpus collecting methods:(1)Discourse completion tests and questionnaires(Barnlund & Akari 1985;Yuan 1996);(2)Recall protocols(Knapp et al.1984);(3)Role-plays(Satio & Beechen 1997);(4)Field observations(Mane & Wolfson 1981);(4)Recordings of naturally occurring talk–in–interaction(Golato 2002,Pomerantz 1978).This thesis aims to analyze the features of compliment responses of undergraduates and postgraduates aged 18-35 years old in WeChat online interlocution.More emphasis will be put on the analysis of the language features of compliment responses,the overall distribution of compliment response strategies,gender differences in using compliment response strategies and the comparison with the results of the previous studies in oral interlocution.WeChat can be regarded as a medium of online interlocution,whose context is different from that in oral and written interlocution.It will affect the performance of language use.Wang Jianhuang(2002)in his article Composition and Classification of Contexts refers that“online interlocution is becoming a communicative means for youngsters,and this new medium affects pragmatic online interlocution……the medium which is different from the traditional medium,can be looked upon as a new context factor”(Zheng Yanfang 2005).Thus,following three questions will be discussed:a)What are the linguistic features of compliment responses in WeChat online interlocution?b)What is the overall distribution of compliment response strategies in WeChat online interlocution? And,is the distribution similar to that in natural face-to-faceinterlocution?c)Is there any differences in compliment responses between male and female groups in WeChat online interlocution?The thesis selects 50 undergraduates and postgraduates,who use WeChat frequently,as the research subjects.To be objective,the quota of the male and female subjects is almost the same and each subject is required to provide at least 6 chat logs related with compliments which needs to come from different interlocutors.After data screening,300 corpora have been collected.The findings of this thesis are:1)In WeChat online interlocution,Compliment responses have the followinglinguistic features: use of oral words,short sentence structures and the creativeapplication of emoticons and punctuations.2)Undergraduates and postgraduates tends to deflect others' compliments rather than reject and accept them in WeChat online interlocution,which is different from previous findings that accepting compliments is the prior selection.This shows that this group of students still follow the modest principle and take face and politeness into consideration.3)There is a significant difference between male and female groups in their selection of compliment response strategies(X2=9.828,p=0.007<0.05 and the minimum expected count 32.81 is bigger than 5).Female groups prefer to accept compliments,while male groups tend to deflect them,which is in agreement with results of previous studies,but the different finding of this study is that females also reject compliments more than males do.Theses rejecting occurrences happen when males pay compliments to females in terms of their appearances,which shows that female groups consider more about their own faces.