An Empirical Research on Chinese-English Bilinguals’ Compliment Responses—A Cross-cultural Perspective

Abstract

Compliments and compliment responses (CRs) are decided by linguistic and sociocultural norms, and further reflect cultural values and social norms. The study of CRs has generated a great number of studies in pragmatics. Previous studies, including Chinese as participants, have investigated Chinese CRs and compared Chinese CRs with people of other languages. According to Holmes’ (1988) taxonomy, CRs can be classified into three categories: Agreeing, Deflecting/Evading and Rejecting. Looking from a cross-cultural perspective, Chinese tend to use less Accepting strategies and more Rejecting strategies than Australians do (Tang and Zhang, 2009). Within the same language community, CR strategies might also change over time, as has been suggested in Chen and Yang’s (2010). However, research on Chinese English-knowing bilinguals’ CRs in the two languages is rare. The present study, focuses on a group of Chinese English-knowing bilinguals’ CR speech act. It aims at finding out whether Chinese English bilinguals will respond to compliments differently, when they are exposed to different media—Chinese language and English language, which might shed new light on how language influences and shapes people’s social and cultural norms. Written discourse completion task (DCT) is used to elicit the participants’ responses to compliments on one’s look, ability, character, possession. The survey was conducted on a cohort of 31 Chinese English teachers, during the period when they were in Singapore. Results show that there are differences in CR strategies employed in Chinese DCT and English DCT.