Abstract

The formulas, contents, and response models of compliments are greatly influenced by their cultures. From these three aspects, the paper explores the differences between English and Chinese compliments and analyses the influence of cultures on them. This paper aims at helping people to recognize different complimenting behaviors influenced by different cultural backgrounds and to give and accept compliments appropriately with a view to improving their cross-cultural communicative competence.

Key words: compliment, compliment formulas, compliment contents, compliment responses, pragmatic approaches, cultural differences

摘 要

称赞语的语言形式，内容，和回应模式都深受其文化影响.本文从这三个方面探索了中英称赞语的差异，并分析了从中反映出的各自文化。本文意在帮助人们意识到不同的称赞行为，更多地了解不同国家的文化对其称赞语的影响，以使人们恰当地称赞他人，恰当地接受称赞，提高跨文化交际的能力，

关键词：称赞语；称赞形式；称赞内容；称赞应答；语用原则；文化差异

1. Introduction
The compliment is an universal language phenomenon. It has a wide range of applications and a high frequency of use. It can be used in greetings, thanks, invitations and congratulations. Sometimes it can also help people escape from an embarrassing situation. As a social communicative language, it can not only shorten the social gap between people, but also help people keep contact with each other and maintain the interpersonal relations.
The basic utterance structure of compliments is “adjacency pair”. Compliments and responses constitute two language acts, and both of them are indispensable. Compliments reflect the cultural values in the community, so compliments with different cultural backgrounds may have different formulae, contents, and response models. The paper will analyse the differences between the English compliments and Chinese compliments in these three aspects to help people avoid pragmatic misuses in cross-cultural communication and improve people’s communicative skills.
2. Demonstration
2.1 Formulas of Compliments
The speech act of complementing is characterized by the formulaic nature of its semantic and syntactic composition. These two types of formulas will be examined separately in this section.