A Contrastive Study Of The Chinese And Thai Compliments

Compliments are recognized as a common form of politely communication and they play an important role in the daily communication.Compliment is not only an external product of the speech act,but it is also a way of social and culture expressions.However,the ways compliments are used and the cultural information contained in them are not the same because of their different of cultural backgrounds.Due to the ways of thinking and cultural backgrounds between Chinese and Thai people are difference,so there are also their own ways of expression and habits in compliment expression and response.Therefore,this article will mainly compare Chinese and Thai compliments.In this paper,Chinese and Thai compliments corpus is collected from films and TV programs and they were analyzed and classified to a data form.The paper is based on a pragmatics theory and explores the analytical approaches used in a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods.And from the comparative method,we will mainly discuss their similarities and contrasting their differences the following aspects: an occasion,concerned topics,the ways to respond,parts of speech and syntactic form in the compliment.The study found that in Chinese and Thai compliments,there are similarities and differences on the occasions,concerned topics,compliment responses,parts of speech and syntactic forms.The usage occasions of Chinese and Thai compliments are mostly the same,but Chinese compliments still appear in request occasions,while Thai does not.The topics of Chinese and Thai compliments mainly focus on the four aspects:ability and achievement,personality,appearance and possession,but the frequency of using is different.However,Chinese and Thai compliments use the same words,but the way to express the words are quite different.the syntactic forms in Chinese and Thai compliments are conventionalization,but the syntactic characteristics of the two are different.The compliment responses of both languages are consistent with "Politeness Principle" and "face theory",but there are derogatory non-consensual of compliment responses in Chinese,and there are only silent non-consensual of compliment responses in Thai.This paper enriches and perfects the researching based on perspective of language comparison in Chinese and Thai compliments and provides new research ideas for the study of compliments.As a resource we hope this will provides a reference for Chinese and Thai language learners and it would also be helpful to the cross-cultural speakers(Chinese and Thai)to improve their communication skills,and at the same time promotes Chinese and Thai learners to better understand the way they use compliments.