A contrastive study of compliment responses among Australian English and Mandarin Chinese speakers

Abstract

This study investigates compliment responses (CR) among Australian English and Mandarin Chinese speakers. The data were collected through the use of written discourse completion tasks (DCT), with four situational settings (appearance, character, ability and possession). A total of 60 university-student informants participated in the study. The findings demonstrate a consistent tendency across the macro, micro and combination levels for the Chinese participants to use fewer Accept strategies, and more Evade and Reject strategies, than their Australian counterparts; that is, the Chinese express appreciation for a compliment less and denigrate themselves more. For the Chinese participants, an implicit and ‘detouring’ approach is at least as desirable as an explicit CR. This is in line with modesty and collectivism—pillars of Chinese culture. Australians on the other hand prefer using explicit CRs. Another finding is that the Chinese participants used far fewer combination strategies than the Australians, indicating that the Australians made more effort when responding to compliments. The variant linguistic manipulations of CRs shown in this study indicate that any universal CR model will fail, because different cultures have different sets of protocols. The findings in this study add a new dimension to the study of CR use.