Article in Translation: Chinese compliment responses in triadic contexts

Abstract

Current studies on compliment responses are largely confined to the dyadic model of communication, without taking into consideration the influence of third parties present. The most commonly used methods of data collection in compliment response research are discourse completion tasks (DCT), role play, etc., the objectivity and accuracy of which remain unconfirmed. With the method of natural conversation recording and targeted elicitation, this article collects 233 cases of female college students' compliment responses in both dyadic and triadic contexts in Beijing and analyzes the data in the model of “acceptance-mitigation-evasion-rejection”. The results show that the frequency of accepting compliments among Chinese college students has increased greatly compared to the findings of Chen (1993), indicating noticeable Western influence on Chinese compliment response strategies. However, there is a significant difference between the acceptance ratio in dyadic and triadic contexts. In dyadic communication, the compliment receivers generally prefer the acceptance strategy, while in triadic contexts, they choose evasion and rejection. This finding indicates that the westernization of compliment response strategies in Chinese culture is a gradual and heterogeneous process and the Self-denigration Maxim still plays an important role in the culture at a deeper level. This study also indicates that the use of DCT tends to raise the ratio of acceptance strategy in general in Chinese compliment response research.