英汉恭维语的跨文化对比

1、英汉恭维语的跨文化对比A Comparative Study of Compliment in English and Chinese Cultures: A Cross-cultural Perspective【】 Compliment as a speech act has attracted more and more researchers both at home and abroad to merit great attention in terms of politeness in the last two decades. What is compliment? It is a

2、 kind of polite verbal behavior, followed by a response expected in peoples daily communication. Compliment is both a mirror and a carrier of the social culture. As part of language, it is no doubt a pragmatic behavior. Hence, these studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of the speech

3、 act of compliment in certain speech community. However, this paper tends to analyze the speech act of compliment from cross-cultural perspective. The paper is organized into the following three parts: 1) the functions of the compliments in both English and Chinese cultures; 2) the different pragmat

4、ic formulas between English and Chinese compliments; and 3) the different responses to compliments between English and Chinese cultures.IntroductionCompliment as a speech act has attracted more and more researchers both at home and abroad to merit great attention in terms of politeness in the last t

5、wo decades. What is compliment? Holmes suggests that it is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speakers, usually that person addressed, for somegood(possession, characteristic, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and hearer (1988

6、: 446). It is a kind of polite verbal behavior, followed by a response expected in peoples daily communication. Compliment is both a mirror and a carrier of the social culture. As part of language, it is no doubt a pragmatic behavior. According to Matsuoka, compliment is an intricate combination of

7、positive evaluation, displayed good feelings, implicit friendliness and half-admitted desire to please (2003: 1). Based on these interpretations, it seems feasible to distinguish compliments, an interpersonal and interactive speech act, from praise, a statement of absolute value with or without inte

8、rpersonal and/or interactive functions. Andin such asense, all the compliments can be considered as praise. Hence, these studies have contributed greatly to ourunderstanding of the speech act of compliment in certain speech community. However, this paper tends to analyze the speech act of compliment

9、 from the cross-cultural perspective. The paper is organized into the following three parts: 1) the functions of the compliments in both English and Chinese cultures; 2) different pragmatic formulas between English and Chinese compliments; and 3) different responses to compliments between English an

10、d Chinese cultures.1 Boss: Well, dont you look cute today? You have such nice clothes.Employee: Thank you. I have had this for a while.From the conversation we can infer that the boss is trying to use compliment to replace greeting. Maybe he had seen the employees clothes before, but he didnt want t

11、o use the same kind of pattern to make greetings everyday, so he employed the compliment.That was outstanding. That theory was well presented and the examples were marvelous.As shown in example 2, a postgraduate student handed in his paper to the professor and when the professor finished reading his

12、 paper, he congratulated the studentby using praise. So it is clear to see that compliments also can be used to replace congratulations. Besides, for some football and basketball fans, they always shout good shot to the player when he kicks the ball into the goal. The illocutionary force of such utt

13、erance is to praise the excellent performance of the player.2.4 To soften face-threatening actsFirst consider the following discourse from a boss to his employee.This is good. I like the way you are handling this. You might put more on the students though, and let them carry on the conversation.Peop

14、le often use compliment to soften face-threatening acts of criticism and to make the person who are being criticized to accept the criticism easily. In the example above, the boss tries to use compliment to confirm the employees strongpoint first and then point out his mistakes. So why would he do s

15、o? Within their everyday social interaction, people generally behave as if their expectations concerning their public self-image, or their face wants, will be respected. If a speaker says something that represents a threat to another individualsexpectations regarding self-image, it is described as a

16、 face-threatening act. Alternatively, given the possibility that some action might be interpreted as a threat to anothers face, the speaker can say something to lessen the possible threat. This is called a face saving act (Yule, 2000:61). In the above example, compliment acts as a positive politenes

17、s strategy or a mitigating device to save the hearers positive face.2.5 To open and sustain conversationHow to open a conversation is sometimes a very complicated thing. According to the research in conversation analysis, the Americans usually prefer to use compliment to open a conversation, especia

18、lly between strangers. For example, once during the break of a concert, a man stood up and talked with his friends, but among his friends there was a lady he didnt know, so he tried to talk to her and complimented her clothes. He said, Thats a beautiful blouse. Where did you get it? whether or not t

19、he lady would tell him the place where she bought the blouse and thank him, their interaction runs well and the man achieves his illocutionary force. This is another basic and important function of compliment.ID. Differe ntcomplime nt formulas betwee n En glish andChineseBased on the pragmatic funct

20、ions of compliments above, different pragmatic formulas concerning compliments between English and Chinese are respectively depicted in great detail to arouse readers attention to compliments in language use or in cross-cultural communication.Female 1: Thats a nice outfit.Female 2: What? Are you kid

21、ding?Disagreement i.e.to deny the compliment, e.g.Female: Charlie, your haircut looks nice.Male: Bullshit! She cut it too short.Qualification, e.g.Male: I like your haircut.Female: But I wanted it even shorter.No acknowledgement, e.g.Male 1: Thats a beautiful sweater.Male 2: Did you finish the assig

22、nment for today?Request Interpretation i.e. to interpret the compliment into a request, e.g.Male 1: Thats a nice bike.Male 2: Let me know if you want to borrow it?From the above examples we can infer that although native English speakers would show non-agreement among friends, acquaintances or peopl

23、e with equal social status, they usually tend to accept the compliment by saying something like Thank you to illustrate his or her appreciation of the praise. To have a better understanding of the cross-culturalcommunication, it is also necessaryto makea further discussion of Chinese compliment resp

24、onse strategies.4.2Chinese compliment response strategiesThe study of Chinese speech act of compliment has observed 103 verbal responses plus 22 non-verbal ones. These verbal responses can be roughly categorized into three subcategories: Accepting, Avoiding and Rejecting or Acceptance, Acceptance wi

25、th Amendmentand Non-acceptance. In fact, a careful examination of Yes sub-categories under Acceptance with Amendment, like Downgrade, Comment, Confirmation, Magnification, Transfer and Return, shows that these strategies are intended to respond to the compliments indirectly, avoiding either acceptin

26、g the compliments directly or disagreeing with the complimenter substantially. Chinese compliment response strategies can be diagrammed in table 4-1.Table 4-1 Percentage of Chinese Compliment Response TypesTable 4-1 shows that the Chinese compliment response types in the present data are similar to

27、Yes (1995) findings. The super-strategy Avoiding makes up 57.28% of the whole data, even 10% higher than Yes Acceptance with Amendment. The most frequently used strategies under this category are Confirmation, Comment and Downgrade. Look at the following responses:1 Shi ma? Lifa shi gei wo sheji de.

28、 (是吗 ?理发师给我设计的。 )Really? The hairdresser designed the style for me.Zhen de ma? Ni zhen de zhemo renwei ma? (真的吗 ,你真的这么认为吗 ?)(Is it) really? Do you really think so?Nali, nali. Bi beifang de tongzhi cha yuan le. (哪里,哪里, 比北方的同志差远了。 )No, no. (My Mandarin is) far from comrades from the North.Zhen de ma?

29、Xiexie.真的吗 ?谢谢。Really? Thank you.As shown, each of these responses involves different strategies. The first is in combination of Confirmation with Comment; the third, a combination of Confirmation, Comment and Downgrade; the fourth, a combination of Rejecting and Downgrade; the fifth, a combination

30、of Confirmation and Thanking. Thus the speech act of compliment is not simply a compliment-response interaction in real life. It can appear in a multiple-round conversation with insertion sequences. The commentpart in the response may easily lead to some other topics. For example:V . Conclusi onThis

31、 paper has attempted to explore the differences of the speech act of compliment between English and Chinese. So in the first part of the paper, it presents a series of studies on the functions of compliment in both English and Chinese cultures. In the second part, the paper focuses on the different

32、pragmatic formulas between English and Chinese. And they are very helpful for the readers in cross-cultural communication. In the third part, the paper shows different compliment response strategies between English and Chinese. From this part we can know that nativeEnglish speakers usually tend to a

33、ccept the compliment. But on the contrary, most of the Chinese people tend to reject the compliment. So one should bear in mind that the speech act of compliment, compliment formulas and responses are depend on the shared beliefs and values of the speech community. From this paper we can infer that

34、social customs vary from culture to culture, so language learners of English should have the sense of pragmatics.However, this paper is conducted in a highly restricted situation. The conclusions are not expected to be generalized. So in the part of Chinese speech act of compliment more studies are

35、expected.ReferencesHolmes, J. (1986). Compliments and compliment responses in New Zealand English. Anthropological linguistics, Vol.28, pp. 485-508Holmes, J. (1988). Paying compliments: a sex-preferential politeness strategy. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 445-465Holmes, J. & Brown, D. F. (1987). Teachers and students learning about compliment