A Critique of “contrastive Analysis of Compliment Between English and Chinese ”

A Critique of “Contrastive Analysis of Compliment between English and Chinese ”

 Introduction of the article

   Rui Yu,  Li Fu & Xiao-Yu         Hou’ s “Contrastive Analysis of Compliment between English and Chinese” is a classic in intercultural communication studies. It is published in Journal of         Intercultural Communication StudiesXVI, 2007, Volume 1, Pages 153-162.

2.  Analysis of the article

The social phenomenon of compliment behavior exists in various societies and linguistic cultures. The compliment behavior can not only enhance the relationship between communicators but also consolidate and strengthen the solidarity among communicators. Thus, the compliment behavior operates like social lubricant. Compliment responses in Chinese and English have different characteristics because they are influenced by different social factors. Consequently, the study on compliment has been paid extensive attention to.This thesis aims at investigating the characteristics of compliment responses in Chinese and English, comparing their differences and similarities and attempting to analyze the reasons which lead to the differences and similarities from cross-cultural perspective.Based on Julia Gousseva’s experiment, a similar experiment was designed and carried out by the present author. The purposes were to find the features of compliment in Chinese by Chinese students, to discover similarities and differences of compliment between English and Chinese and to explore the reasons why the differences in linguistic performance exist.

    This article provides deeper research on this subject and examines genre of written discourse. Most of previous studies abroad and in China focus on the syntax and the topic of compliment behavior itself. This article also claims that most of the studies,such as its function,implication,and causes are based mostly on the study on the oral compliment.

    As for the oral compliment,this paper shows it very clear in the literature review. And it demonstrates the syntactic differences between Chinese and English compliments by the table.When it comes to the research on the written complient,it mentions focusly on the gender difference in compliment.

    In this thesis, the quantitative method and the qualitative method are adopted. It collects materials from college students at Chinese Department of a University,and native speakers of Chinese and non-English majors. The experiment was carefully designed so as to keep great resemblance with that of Julia Gousseva’s. And the study consisted of two parts, (1) gender-linked features, such as positive evaluation, intensifiers and personal involvement, and (2) discourse strategies, such as good/bad new strategies, opening, closing and framing strategies, and their interests were on the differences associated genders. Then it analyzes the data and summarizes the different characteristics on compliment responses in Chinese and English through a couple of tables. Finally, it explains the differences in the application of linguistic forms and strategy to the compliment, so as to learn the social and cultural factors that might account for these differences.

The major findings of this study are as follows:(1) the biggest difference lies in the use of positive evaluation, that is to say the American students use more positive evaluation. This may be explained by that many Americans are very active in expressing their ideas and feelings while more Chinese would like to choose neutral words and restrain their feeling, for many of them were taught to be observed and not to be heard when they were young. Most of the English speakers tend to accept compliments. Moreover, they often offer series of comments on the object complimented when they accept compliments. They usually express their disagreement directly when they reject compliments. In addition, English speaker use some combined strategies to express their responses to compliment.(2) The American students use more first person pronoun (2.17 vs. 0.93) and less third person pronouns (1.09 vs. 2.68) than their Chinese counterparts. It is known to us that the idea of being self-oriented is favored by many people in America. They intend to maximize the use of first person pronoun in order to show their opinion directly in interaction. On the contrary, the idea of other-oriented has exerted influence over China for thousands of years, and many Chinese learn to minimize self importance by maximizing the use of the third person pronoun. Most of Chinese people tend to reject compliments. When they accept compliments, Chinese people often transfer the eompliment to some third person or to the object itself. Besides, Chinese speakers have one more strategy—Determination Expression to respond to compliment. They tend to express their determinations when they meet compliment from persons who have higher status. In addition, Chinese speakers employ more diverse sub-strategies to respond to compliments than English speakers. Finally, More Chinese speakers tend to give no response when they meet compliments than English speakers.(3) Chinese college students tend to accept compliments much more frequently than other people. The reason lies in students’ adaptation to the change of culture which results from social development and the influence of foreign cultures.(4) The reason of all these differences can attribute to their adaptation to different social worlds, which include different traditional values, different politeness principles, different realization of face, and influence of western culture.The study has some significance. Firstly, this study helps us understand differences between Chinese and English compliment responses. Thus, pragmatic mistakes in the cross-cultural communication can be avoided. Secondly, this study also gives the analysis of the Chinese compliment responses which enables more foreigners to know and accept Chinese communication criterions. Finally, it makes a conclusion that culture and language are interwoven, and the inclination of communicative choices is closely associated with social norms and cultural background.