Responding to compliments in Chinese: Has it changed?  

Oleh:

Chen, Rong ; Yang, Dafu

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 42 no. 7 (Jul. 2010), page 1951–1963.
Topik: Compliment response Compliment Compliment rejection Compliment acceptance Politeness Brown and Levinson Leech Chinese
Fulltext: Chen_R.pdf (309.46KB)

Isi artikel

Compliment responding (CR) is one of the most studied speech acts in pragmatics. CR in Chinese, in particular, has enjoyed considerable attention from students of pragmatics. Chen (1993) finds that Chinese compliment responses (CRs) are characterized by rejection, whereby speakers typically denigrate the object of the compliment when they respond to compliments. Since then, studies on Chinese CRs have yielded a wide range of results, suggesting that the CR behavior of Chinese is a very complicated phenomenon, although, on the whole, rejection still seems a defining feature of Chinese CRs. In this paper, we report on a quasi-longitudinal study of CRs in Chinese. The study replicates Chen (1993), adopting the same instrument, in the same research site (Xi’an, China), with a similar subject population. Using the findings of Chen (1993) as a baseline for comparison, the study reveals drastic changes in the way Xi’an Chinese responding to compliments. That is, instead of overwhelmingly rejecting compliments as reported in Chen (1993), Xi’an Chinese are now found to overwhelmingly accept compliments. In fact, they accept compliments as much as do speakers of many Western languages such as English and German. We attribute this change to the influx of Western cultural influences that has occurred in the City of Xi’an since the early 1990s. We will also discuss the significance and implications of our work, which is possibly the first longitudinal study in pragmatics.

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