A Study of Compliment Responses Uttered by Senior High School Students in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Si-yuan Wu, 吳思遠
• Other Authors: Yu-fang Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/62182335830684859186

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系研究所 === 94 === The aim of this study is to examine compliment responses among senior high school students. The motivation of this study is driven by seeking out an omission in previous studies on Chinese compliment behavior. Specifically, most of these studies shed too much light on compliment responses among college students but with very little reference to participants of younger ages, such as senior high school students. This study, however, tends to find out the common strategies of compliment responses used by senior high school students and gender preferences for the strategies of compliment responses. The data of the present study are based on Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaires, which were conducted by 200 senior high school students (half of them are male students and half are female students) at St. Dominic Senior High School in Kaohsiung in Taiwan. In order to supply statistically reliant results, the present study employed percentages to examine whether the relations between variables, such as gender and topics, and frequency occurrences of participants’ strategies were significantly different or not. . The result shows that what governs younger complimentees’, i.e., senior high school students, complimenting behavior is the Agreement Maxim as described by Leech (1983), quite different from that in previous studies on Chinese compliment responses: both male and female complimentees’ strategies in response to compliments appear to act only according to the Modesty Maxim. To put it in another way, senior high school students have greater tendency to accept compliments than to reject them. When being complimented, the male subjects tend to employ the PRAISE UPGRADE AND JOKING type as their favorite strategy to respond to male complimenters and the SCALE DOWN (AND RETURN OR REASSIGNMENT) type to respond to female complimenters. In terms of the female subjects, their preferred strategy to respond to compliment givers, either of the same gender or different, is the APPRECIATION TOKEN type. On the other hand, when being complimented on different topics, the subjects also have their exclusive preferences for compliment response strategies, which fairly run counter to previous studies on Chinese compliments. In compliments on appearance, the most commonly employed strategy is the PRAISE UPGRADE AND JOKING type. In light of possession and ability, they refer to the APPRECIATION TOKEN type as their first selection. Considering personality, they prefer to employ the SCALE DOWN (AND RETURN OR REASSIGNMENT) type than others. To sum up, the majority of their compliment response strategies are more likely to act based on the Agreement Maxim, which shows the senior high school students’ integration and assimilation to the western cultural values and norms as well as the intention to maintain and enhance their social solidarity.