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Aprobe into Compliments in Different Contexts

Author: LiuXiaoLi
Tutor: XieXianZe；LuoRunTian；DuanCheng；LiWuQuan；YanLiMing
School: Chengdu University of Technology
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: compliments CP PP context
CLC: H030
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 132
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Abstract

As "social lubricants" (Wolfson, 1983: 89), compliments are primarily aimed at maintaining, enhancing or supporting the addressees’ face. How to give compliments and respond to compliments properly plays an important part in human beings’ daily life for the behaviors of compliments giving and compliments responding are widely used to negotiate people’s social identities and maintain people’s relations. In order to make compliments more effective, many language experts and scholars have made great efforts to analyze them and have made many suggestions for the public to follow. Austin put forward Speech Act Theory, an important theory analyzing speech acts. Grice defined the Cooperative Principle (CP) in 1975 as the following:“Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”(He Ziran, 2006: 65). This principle is made up of four detailed and explicit maxims: Quality Maxim, Quantity Maxim, Relation Maxim and Manner Maxim. Although this principle did not explicitly mention compliments, one has to take this principle into consideration when dealing with compliments. However, in real communication, there are many cases that participants do not obey these maxims, or even violate such maxims. In order to explain the reason, in 1978, Brown and Levinson put forward another important theory on politeness - the Politeness Principle (PP), which consists of a set of maxims related to CP– Tact Maxim, Generosity Maxim, Approbation Maxim, Modesty Maxim, Agreement Maxim and Sympathy Maxim. When dealing with compliments, Approbation Maxim, Modesty Maxim and Agreement Maxim are important maxims one has to take into consideration. However, as one may choose different words when adopting different maxim, in order to help he/she choose the suitable maxim, more analyses are still needed.Many linguists and scholars at home or abroad have conducted their researches on compliments from different aspects to explain people’s different choice of words. For example, they found, because of cultural differences, people from China and people from English-speaking countries may deal with compliments differently; because of value differences, people from different communities or groups may treat compliments differently, etc. Moreover, these differences may result in misunderstandings or even conflicts among these participants. However, there is rare analysis to explain why people from the same country or with the same values may have different views on compliments sometimes. In fact, through the analyses made by the author, it is found that most of these differences are related to language users’context-free treating of compliments. On the other side, context plays a very important role in the study of speech act and we can even say that without context, the study of language may have little pragmatic meaning. As an indispensable part of speech act, compliments and responses to them should be studied with due consideration of context. That is to say, under different contexts, you have to adopt different maxims to deal with compliments.In this paper, the author makes a probe into compliments in different contexts. In order to make the classification of context chosen in this paper appropriate, after a careful comparison of different classifications of context, the author finds the classification made by Verschueren is exhaustive, consistent, economical and objective. According to Verschueren, context can be classified into two: linguistic context and communicative context. So the author uses this classification in this paper, and analyzes compliments in different contexts, with theories of CP and PP. The analyses are made in hope of drawing more attention from and give some insights to language experts, scholars and compliments learners in particular, which would help compliments givers and addressees deal with them more appropriately, with less mistakes or conflicts.

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