| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學研究所 === 99 === Studies to date have concentrated mostly on monolingual analysis, or contrastive analysis of compliments in bilingual corpora; however, little empirical research has been done on compliments and compliment responses in interlanguage analysis. The present study aims at exploring compliment and compliment response sequences produced by English learners of Chinese and Chinese speakers in Taiwan. This study has three concerns. First, the main concern in the study is to determine the categories of compliments, the basic syntactic forms and the major compliment focus in Mandarin. Second, the study will determine the strategies for compliment responses, which Chinese speakers in Taiwan prefer to use. Finally, to investigate the perception of implicit compliments and the distinction of non-compliment forms for English learners of Chinese. The study was carried out through the use of oral discourse completion tests (ODCT) supplemented by interviews.
The research shows that both Chinese speakers and English learners of Chinese prefer to compliment on the topics of appearance and performance. With regard to syntactic forms preference, the NP/PRON + (intensifier) + ADJ pattern is mostly used. With respect to the compliment focus, both groups of participants use “subject” as the compliment focus rather than the ”object/action”. In addition, under the influence of collectivism and the high-context culture, Chinese speakers care more about the addressee and tend to use “you” as the subject of the structure to show their respect to the addressee. In contrast, English learners of Chinese governed by the individualism and the low-context culture prefer using “I” to demonstrate their own opinions.
As for the compliment response, with a different definition of politeness based on the opposite cultural background, Chinese speakers are more likely to reject a compliment. Specifically, Chinese speakers prefer to combine two different strategies to respond to a compliment. The reject response type is the case of modesty application, that is, strategies for self-praise avoidance for Chinese. In contrast, English learners of Chinese tend to accept a compliment and they regard the accept response type as the proper way to show politeness to the addressee.
Besides, either the perception of the implicit compliments or the distinction of the non-compliment forms would cause difficulties for English learners of Chinese. So, the researcher designed practical lesson plans for basic, intermediate, and advanced students with pedagogical illustrations based on the empirical findings in the present research. This will help teach foreign students how to perceive implicit compliments, distinguish the non-compliment forms, give compliments and respond to compliments in a polite way in order to develop the ability for cross-cultural communication.
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