Exploring judges’ compliments and criticisms on American, British, and Taiwanese talent shows

Abstract

Whereas previous research on talent shows has investigated exclusively either criticisms or compliments, this study explores both speech acts of judges to provide a more comprehensive picture of their commenting behaviors. Sixty comments from American, British, and Taiwanese talent shows respectively were selected and analyzed with regard to compliment strategies (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989; Ye, 1995; Yu, 2005; Yuan, 2002) and criticism strategies (Chen and Rau, 2015; Nguyen, 2005, 2008, 2013; Tang, 2016). In addition, Spencer-Oatey's (2000, 2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2008) framework was applied to explore how the judges managed rapport with their contestants. The findings indicated that the American judges produced a great number of compliments on successful and unsuccessful performances to achieve relational goals and attended to the contestants' quality face and association right. On the other hand, the British and Taiwanese judges were more oriented to transactional goals but in different ways. The former opted for clear evaluations by offering significantly more explicit than implicit compliments and more direct than indirect criticisms. The latter expressed significantly more direct statements of problems and preferred indirect suggestion criticisms to demonstrate their social identity face as experts in the entertainment industry.