Contrastive Analysis of Compliment between English and Chinese

Compliment has been regarded by many as an expression to show one’s fondness and good wishes, and it is defined in the dictionary as “an expression of praise, admiration, or congratulation; a formal act of civility, courtesy or respect” (The American Heritage Dictionary, p. 302). Another definition accepted by many scholars is that “a compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some “good (possession, characteristics, skill, etc.), which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer” (Holmes, 1988). Its function is to please the addressee (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Herbert, 1990). In addition, they point out that compliment may have many other interpersonal functions, e.g., expressing sarcasm or disapproval, putting someone down, insulting, manipulating, and performing various FTAs (Holmes, 1988). Numerous scholars have conducted research on compliments. Based on the previous study, this article provides deeper research on this subject from crosscultural perspective. This paper examines genre of written discourse—peer review and compares various aspects of American compliment and Chinese compliment to determine whether there are any differences and similarities between the two. Literature Review Research on Oral Compliment Extensive research has been done about compliment, such as its function, implication, and causes, particularly in the study of oral compliment. Most of the literature on compliment during the last three decades has focused on oral compliment. In earlier work, Wolfson investigated complimenting behavior among middle class Americans, and results show considerable amount of patterning at both syntactic and semantic levels. The investigation of a corpus of approximate seven hundred examples of compliments uttered in daily interactions reveals that the spontaneity with which they are often associated is linked more to their freedom of occurrence within an interaction than to any originality in structure or lexicon (Wolfson, 1984). For example, 85% of the compliments Wolfson examined are made up of three core syntactic patterns: (1)NP is /looks (really) ADJ (e.g., “That shirt is so nice.”) (2)I (really) like /love NP (e.g., “I love your hair.”) (3)Pronoun is (really)(a) ADJ NP (e.g., “This was really a great meal.”)