A Study on Compliments in Cross-cultural Communication
—How to Leave a Good Impression
Abstract: Complimenting, said to be a social “lubricant”, is a positive and frequently used speech act. By using compliments properly, we can achieve a good impression in communication. This paper tries to make a comparative analysis about compliments in terms of functions, forms of expressions, ways of reply and topics, which help people understand the cultural differences better, hence to improve their intercultural communicative competence.
Key words: Compliments; Cultural differences; Cross-cultural Communication; Good Impression
1. Introduction
Language can reflect a nation’s feature, which not only includes its historical and cultural background but also contains their ways of existence, life and thought. Complimenting, said to be a social “lubricant”, is a positive and frequently used speech act. Both English compliments and Chinese compliments can be interpreted as formulaic on basic syntactic level and semantic level. But they differ greatly on semantic level. Both of them focus their topics on such four aspects as appearance, achievement and ability, trait, possession though they are different in preferred ones. As for responding strategy, “Modesty strategy” is often used in Chinese compliments, while strategies of “Accepting” and “Returning” are more common in English compliments.
2. Topics of Compliment
Based on Wolfson’s classification, we clarify compliment topics into four categories: appearance, ability, possession and trait. Appearance refers to one’s looks, including haircut, eyes and clothing etc. ability means the “quality of something produced through the addressee’s skill or effort: a well-done job, a skillfully played game, a good meal”. Possession refers to a person’s belongings, including homes, furniture, automobiles as well as children; spouse etc. Trait includes such personalities as loyalty, kindness, maturity and intelligence.
Despite the fact that there are general topics people from different cultures compliment or comment on, some studies also find that, different cultures may have different preferential topics for complement. Compliment topics, to a large extent, are constrained by such factors as social values, norms, cultural background. Similarities and differences on topic between them will be analyzed thoroughly below.
2.1 Topics on Appearance
In English and American cultures, positive evaluations on appearance or looks account for a very large part due to their mutual complimenting. Other’s any change in appearance is deserved to complement for sowing one’s interest or respect to others. Among them, especially female’s looks, which is less influenced by their age, social status and profession, is always the topic. While in America, compliments on appearance are usually related to the result of individual effort, but less concerning about something born beauty. For example, they pay a lot of compliments on hairstyle but few to the hair quality. Others like “you are beautiful” seldom happens, but “you look nice” or “you look pretty” are more common. Besides their compliments seem to be labeled with “time limit”, for instance, “you look nice today.”
Different from English compliments, topics on appearance are not the most preferential in China. While female’s looks is also a common topic in Chinese compliments though it does not lead a major role in compliments. Moreover, complimenting a female’s looks from man is usually considered as a taboo, except for jokes among acquaintance. Chinese compliments concerning appearance may usually go with “born beauty”. Accordingly, “天生丽质” is always considered as the highest evaluation to ladies in all ages.
Another difference exists in complimentary addressee, English and American people usually compliment their family members in other’s presence with the complimentary addressee, including their spouses, children etc. while things go oppositely in most Chinese cases since they are educate to avoid self praise.
2.2 Topics on Ability and Trait
Compliments concerning achievement and ability differ in the following aspects. First, English compliments lay emphasis on the result of individual effort, similar to “appearance” discussed above, but not their born conditions like personal ability, intelligence. On the contrary, in Chinese they are nature-oriented, that is person’s natural wisdom, aptitude, gift are greatly valued. Second, in western countries the compliments are usually from super ordinate to subordinate in order to keep a good term between employers and employees. While in china, based on Jia Yuxin’s data, 33% of Chinese do not complement other’s working ability and achievement, but about 58% of Chinese young men perform compliments to their superordinate to get appreciation from them.
2.3 Topics on Possession
Topics on possession show the same low frequency in both English compliments and Chinese compliments. The difference exists in that it is natural to compliment other’s possessions in western context, while it is not always safe to praise other’s possessions in china, especially between people in close relationship with each other. The reason lies in that the complement will be probably considered as a request for the possessions and result in an embarrassment between the speaker and the hearer.
Similarities do exist on “newness” in both cultures. “Newness” is so highly valued that you may pay complement whenever your acquaintances get anything new. That is why appearance and possession are very popular topics in both cultures. Therefore, compliment speech act is regarded as phatic communication and functions as conversation openers in many cases, but sometimes it can be a face-threatening ac depending on the choice of different topics.
3. Compliment Responses
The conversational structure of compliment is usually adjacency pair, that is compliments and compliment responses appear together. As for the strategy of English compliment response, many people commonly think that a simply “thank you” may work, which can be certified by Johnson below.
Whenever you are complimented, the only response necessary is “thank you” …Don’t disgrace yourself. If someone admires your dress, don’t say “this is old thing; I got it at a bargain basement sale.” A simple “thank you” is sufficient. (Johnson, 1979: 43-44)
The majority of the English compliment responses fall into the category of “acceptance”. This phenomenon may show that the hearer wants to minimize the disagreement between self and the other, the bulk of English compliments are not literal statements of admiration, praise and so forth, but rather are offers of solidarity.
However, as far as Chinese compliments are concerned, it can be classified mainly into three strategies: Rejecting, Thanking and Denigrating, and Accepting (Chen, 1993:55). Among his findings, first, “rejecting” accounts for 95.63%; second, “thanking and denigrating” take up 3.41% and “accepting” only occupies 1.03%. This tendency appears to be substantiated by norm of “modesty”. While in the modern Chinese context, more and more Chinese people put emphasis on individuality rather than self-denigration due to the economic and cultural globalization, there must be a change on responding strategies.
4. Strategies for Good Impression
From the analysis about English and Chinese compliments above, we know that compliment plays a very important role in leaving a deep and good impression in communication, whether in intra-cultural or cross-cultural communication. The key point is that we should know how to compliment and how to respond because the way of compliments is different in different cultures. As is mentioned above, we can compliment the people that we are talking to from such four aspects as appearance, achievement and ability, trait, and possession. Most importantly, it is more reasonable for people to choose different ways of expression as for different people in order to prevent the negative outcome from happening. It is worthwhile to point out that compliment is a very important and practical way of achieving a good impression, but not the only one. We can also choose some other ways like being polite, being humorous, showing one’s own impressing character and so on, which are not explained in details because they are not in the scope discussed in this paper.
5. Conclusion
To sum up, this thesis gives a brief comparison between English compliments and Chinese compliments in terms of compliments topics and their responses, analyzing the differences and similarities between them based on the cultural factors. Both English compliments and Chinese compliments contain their peculiar emphasis within these aspects. English compliments show more on the topics on appearance and possession while those in Chinese favor the topic on ability and achievements. As for compliment responses, English speaking people are ready to accept the credit offered by others while Chinese are more likely to reject or deflect the credit, which indicates the English speakers’ responding strategies are mostly motivated by Agreement maxim, whereas the Chinese speakers’ strategies are driven by modesty maxim.
The cultural differences between Chinese and English contexts are fully reflected by the differences of their compliments, which will help people understand the different cultural backgrounds better, use the compliment as an important way of achieving a good impression and hence improve their intercultural communicative competence.
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