A Study on Compliment Response Strategies by Chinese College Students

Abstract

Complimenting behavior, as a common speech act of human beings, has become an intriguing topic in linguistics and its sub-branches. The study aims to collect and summarize the CR strategies by Chinese college students. An overall distribution is presented of CR strategies, choices of CR strategies by genders and choices of CR strategies under different contextual factors like relative social power or social distance between the speaker and the hearer. The findings show that CR strategies by Chinese college students have changed a lot and are much different with the traditional patterns: (1) Chinese college students prefer Acceptance strategy to Rejection strategy, and Implicit Acceptance strategy is the first choice. (2)The females have greater tendency to use Explicit Acceptance strategy than the males; whereas the males prefer to use Deflection and Rejection strategies. (3) People prefer to use the Explicit Acceptance strategy when they respond to the compliment from an unfamiliar person or a person with relative greater social power; whereas, Deflection and Rejection strategies are more frequently adopted when people respond to the compliment from a familiar person or a person without relatively greater social power. Under the guidance of pragmatic and sociolinguistics, CR strategies are discussed in terms of Politeness Theories and Social Distance and Social Power affect. It is concluded that the western cultural influences Chinese college students’ employment of pragmatic strategies, which are mostly a compromise under the guidance by universal Politeness theories and Chinese socio-cultural context.