【摘要】恭维语作为礼貌现象的一部份在迄今的二十年里吸引了国内外很多研究者的目光。 恭维语作为一种礼貌的言语行为,在人们的日常生活中总是跟答语成对出现的。它既是文化的载体也同时是反映文化的一面镜子。作为语言的一部分它毫无疑问是一种语用行为。因此,本文的目的是使读者对特殊语言群体里的恭维这一言语行为有更深的认识。本人试图从跨文化对比的角度对恭维语进行分析,具体分为以下三部分:①英汉恭维语的功能。②英汉语言中恭维语不同的语用套语。③英汉语言中恭维语的不同答语。
　　【关键词】恭维语,跨文化的,英语,汉语
　　A Comparative Study of Compliment in English and Chinese Cultures: A Cross-cultural Perspective
　　【Abstract】Compliment as a speech act has attracted more and more researchers both at home and abroad to merit great attention in terms of politeness in the last two decades. What is compliment? It is a kind of polite verbal behavior, followed by a response expected in people's daily communication. Compliment is both a mirror and a carrier of the social culture. As part of language, it is no doubt a pragmatic behavior. Hence, these studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of the speech act of compliment in certain speech community. However, this paper tends to analyze the speech act of compliment from cross-cultural perspective. The paper is organized into the following three parts: 1) the functions of the compliments in both English and Chinese cultures; 2) the different pragmatic formulas between English and Chinese compliments; and 3) the different responses to compliments between English and Chinese cultures.
　　【Key words】Compliment;cross-cultural;English;Chinese
　　Ⅰ. Introduction
　　Compliment as a speech act has attracted more and more researchers both at home and abroad to merit great attention in terms of politeness in the last two decades. What is compliment? Holmes suggests that it is "a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speakers, usually that person addressed, for some'good'(possession, characteristic, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and hearer" (1988: 446). It is a kind of polite verbal behavior, followed by a response expected in people's daily communication. Compliment is both a mirror and a carrier of the social culture. As part of language, it is no doubt a pragmatic behavior. According to Matsuoka, compliment is an "intricate combination of positive evaluation, displayed good feelings, implicit friendliness and half-admitted desire to please" (2003: 1). Based on these interpretations, it seems feasible to distinguish 'compliments', an interpersonal and interactive speech act, from praise, a statement of absolute value with or without interpersonal and/or interactive functions. And in such a sense, all the compliments can be considered as praise. Hence, these studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of the speech act of compliment in certain speech community. However, this paper tends to analyze the speech act of compliment from the cross-cultural perspective. The paper is organized into the following three parts: 1) the functions of the compliments in both English and Chinese cultures; 2) different pragmatic formulas between English and Chinese compliments; and 3) different responses to compliments between English and Chinese cultures.
　　Ⅱ. The function of compliment in both English and Chinese cultures
　　Compliment refers to a positive expression or evaluation directed either explicitly or implicitly to someone for something valued positively by the speaker and the hearer, and even the whole speech community (Holmes, 1986; Ye, 1995). Its major function is to establish and maintain social "rapport" (Manes and Wolfson, 1981:124) and smoothness between interlocutors. And its primary function lies in "the reinforcement and/or creation of solidarity" (Holms, 1986:486) between the speaker and hearer." (p: 486). Similarly, the Chinese scholar Zhang Ailin maintained that together with praise compliments can help establish good relationship, which contributes to the smooth process of communication (2003: 166). Therefore, there is no reason for us not to conclude that compliment serves the similar purposes in both English culture and Chinese culture. Humans more or less like other's compliments and praises, it is natural. In the coming section, five functions are explored to give the readers a clearer understanding of the compliments.
　　2.1To express admiration or approval
　　Compliments are always used to express admiration or approval of someone's work, appearance, taste, and so on.It is commonly used in both English and Chinese culture. Take the following sentences for example:
　　1 You are looking good today.
　　2 This dress (is) very beautiful.
　　3 I think your apartment is fantastic.
　　4 You (play) Ping-pong very well.
　　5 You do this kind of writing so well. It has just the right tone.
　　As illustrated above, people often praise each other as to their health, appearance, possession or performance, etc. While performing the speech act of compliment, they prefer to use such adjectives as cute, divine, great and terrific.
　　2.2 To establish, confirm or maintain solidarity
　　Human beings are rational. They expect and are expected to establish ideal public self-images in talk transaction. And to keep the communication going on, they have to cooperate with each other and show politeness. In this sense, interlocutors employ the speech act of compliment as exemplified below:
　　1 These surely are nice sneakers you're wearing.
　　2 The dress looks really nice on you, Deb.
　　3 You are the best pastry cook in the town, Vera.
　　4 I like your shoes. They are really cute.
　　5 Wow, this is a very good report card. You must be very smart.
　　The above examples can be explained by Leech's (1983) Agreement Maxim: minimize disagreements between self and other and maximize agreements between self and other. The speakers' purpose is to obtain identification and trust from the others so as to establish good relationship and maintain solidarity.
　　2.3 To replace greetings, gratitude, apologies or congratulations
　　Speakers in social contact tend to replace greetings, apologies or congratulations in terms of the speech act of compliment. Such cases are quite popular among collogues, friends or acquaintances who meet again on some occasion after a long departure. Just consider the conversation between a boss and a young female employee in the following:
　　1 Boss: Well, don't you look cute today? You have such nice clothes.
　　Employee: Thank you. I have had this for a while.
　　From the conversation we can infer that the boss is trying to use compliment to replace greeting. Maybe he had seen the employee's clothes before, but he didn't want to use the same kind of pattern to make greetings everyday, so he employed the compliment.
　　2 That was outstanding. That theory was well presented and the examples were marvelous.
　　As shown in example 2, a postgraduate student handed in his paper to the professor and when the professor finished reading his paper, he congratulated the student by using praise. So it is clear to see that compliments also can be used to replace congratulations. Besides, for some football and basketball fans, they always shout "good shot" to the player when he kicks the ball into the goal. The illocutionary force of such utterance is to praise the excellent performance of the player.
　　2.4 To soften face-threatening acts
　　First consider the following discourse from a boss to his employee.
　　1 This is good. I like the way you are handling this. You might put more on the students though, and let them carry on the conversation.
　　People often use compliment to soften face-threatening acts of criticism and to make the person who are being criticized to accept the criticism easily. In the example above, the boss tries to use compliment to confirm the employee's strongpoint first and then point out his mistakes. So why would he do so? Within their everyday social interaction, people generally behave as if their expectations concerning their public self-image, or their face wants, will be respected. If a speaker says something that represents a threat to another individual's expectations regarding self-image, it is described as a face-threatening act. Alternatively, given the possibility that some action might be interpreted as a threat to another's face, the speaker can say something to lessen the possible threat. This is called a face saving act (Yule, 2000:61). In the above example, compliment acts as a positive politeness strategy or a mitigating device to save the hearer's positive face.
　　2.5 To open and sustain conversation
　　How to open a conversation is sometimes a very complicated thing. According to the research in conversation analysis, the Americans usually prefer to use compliment to open a conversation, especially between strangers. For example, once during the break of a concert, a man stood up and talked with his friends, but among his friends there was a lady he didn't know, so he tried to talk to her and complimented her clothes. He said, "That's a beautiful blouse. Where did you get it?" whether or not the lady would tell him the place where she bought the blouse and thank him, their interaction runs well and the man achieves his illocutionary force. This is another basic and important function of compliment.
　　Ⅲ. Different compliment formulas between English and Chinese
　　Based on the pragmatic functions of compliments above, different pragmatic formulas concerning compliments between English and Chinese are respectively depicted in great detail to arouse readers' attention to compliments in language use or in cross-cultural communication.
　　3.1English compliment formulas
　　Compliments are proved to be "remarkably formulaic speech acts" (Holms and Brown 1987:529). This formulaic nature can be represented at lexical and syntactical levels. As Manes and Wolfson put it, the speech act of complimenting is characterized by the formulaic nature of its syntactic and semantic composition (1981:123), and the overwhelmingly majority of compliments contain one of highly restricted set of adjectives and verbs (ibids, 116). Lexically, 80% of the compliments in their data contain the adjectival semantic carrier and 67.6% are significant in one of the following adjectives: nice, good, beautiful, pretty and great. It also indicates two most frequently used verbs, like and love parallel to 86% of all the compliments that contain a positive semantic verb. Similar cases can be found in the use of intensifiers, deictic elements such as second person pronouns and demonstratives. Syntactically the following three types of sentences are prominent in American English:
　　Type1: NP +is /looks+ (intensifier) Adj e.g.
　　That shirt is so nice.
　　It looks so comfortable.
　　Type 2: I+ (intensifier)+ like/love +NP e.g.
　　I really like those shoes.
　　I love your hair.
　　Type 3: PRO+ is +(intensifier) (a/an)+ Adj NP e.g.
　　This was really a great meal.
　　That's really a nice piece of work.
　　Holmes and Brown's research (1987) of 200 compliments collected in New Zealand also demonstrates the similar results as illustrated in Type 1-3. The three syntactic structures in the latter research account for 78.0﹪ of the data. At the semantic level, five most frequent adjectives namely, nice, good, beautiful, lovely and wonderful, cover the largest proportion. Most of the nonadjectival compliments are realized through the use of few semantically positive verbs, such as like, love, enjoy, admire and impressed by, with like and love accounting for 80﹪, that of the former research.
　　3.2 Chinese compliment formulas
　　After examining the English compliment formula, it is also necessary for us to explore those Chinese ones at the semantic and syntactic levels. Many verbal and nonverbal reactions and responses have been collected in this section. It is interesting to note that a Chinese compliment may, to some extent similarly, be realized through the use of some semantically positive adjectives/stative verbs. Although it is not so restricted for a Chinese compliment to contain one of a few adjectives or verbs as it is in American English. Due to the complexities of the Chinese language, adjectives can also be used as verbs or adverbs in different linguistic context. Just take the following sentences for example:
　　1 Ta chuan zhe yi jian piaoliang de qunzi. (她穿着一件漂亮的裙子。)
　　She is wearing a beautiful skirt.
　　2 Zhe jian yifu hen piaoliang. (这件衣服很漂亮。)
　　This dress is very beautiful.
　　It is difficult and perhaps inappropriate to tell the range of adjectives/stative verbs, which can be used in compliments. However, some words that are generally applicable to different topics do occur more often than others. Typical ones are hao (good), piaoliang (beautiful), bang (great), bucuo (not bad) and haokan (nice, beautiful) e.g.
　　3 Zhe maoshan zhen haokan. (这毛衫真好看。)
　　This sweater is very beautiful.
　　4 Qiuyi bucuo ma. (球艺不错吗。)
　　You play Ping-pong not bad.
　　Adverbs are used less frequently in Chinese compliments, and the most often used ones are hao (well) and bucuo (not bad) e.g.
　　5 Ni qiu da de zhen hao. (你球打得真好。)
　　You play Ping-pong very well.
　　6 Ni cai zuo de bucuo. (你菜做得不错。)
　　You cook very well.
　　Nouns occur only in small percent of the samples as the single positive semantic carriers and if possible they appear together with other forms such as liangxiazi 两下子 and shou 手 (gaoshou 高手, yishou 一手, and haoshou 好手), both meaning "a good hand" or "an expert", e.g.
　　7 Mei xiangdao ni haiyou zhe shou. (没想到你还有这手。)
　　I didn't expect you to be so good at this.
　　8 Shenme shihou xue de zhe yishou? (什么时候学得这一手?)
　　When did you learn this skill?
　　Syntactically, it is not likely for Chinese compliments to be so restricted in sentence structures as American and New Zealand ones are. A Chinese speech act of compliment can be performed in unlimited number of syntactic patterns. It is impossible to analyze all the possible structure here but two typical ones as follows:
　　Type 1: Object/Action + intensifier + positive semantic carrier (Adj/Stative verb or adverb)
　　9 Ni de qiu da de zhen bang. (你的球打得真棒。)
　　You play Ping-pong very well.
　　10 Zhe weir zhen xiang a ! (这味儿真香!)
　　This smell is very nice.
　　Type 2: Agent + intensifier + positive semantic carrier (Adj/Stative verb or noun)
　　11 Ni zhen you liangxiazi. (你真有两下子。)
　　You are a real expert.
　　12 Ni zhen liaobuqi. (你真了不起。)
　　You are great.
　　As demonstrated, there are some fixed patterns in both English compliment formulas and Chinese compliment formulas. Adjectives, such as good, nice, pretty, beautiful and great are used most frequently in English speech act of compliment formulas, especially nice and good. So are verbs like and love. In Chinese compliment, hao (good), piaoliang (beautiful), bang (great), bucuo (not bad) and haokan (nice, beautiful) account for a large proportion in daily use. Cultural differences are not only occurring in compliment formulas, but also in the compliment responses.
　　Ⅳ. Different compliment response strategies between English and Chinese cultures
　　Compliment responses vary greatly from one culture to another. It is even so in English-speaking countries, such as Britain, America and South Africa. So the differences are even more significant in the countries with totally different cultures. Native speakers usually tend to accept the compliment, while Chinese people are ready to reject it or denigrate themselves. Although Chinese people like praises from others in nature, they still tend to reject it in appearance due to the influence of the traditional Chinese value. They think of modesty as the highest principle in dealing with everyday life, even though the traditional value is being changed gradually with globalization of information. Thus in this section come the different response strategies between English and Chinese cultures.
　　4.1 English compliment response strategies
　　Studies of the speech event of complimenting examine not only what and how to pay compliments but also look at how to respond to compliments appropriately in a given content. To our knowledge, Pomerantz is the first to work on the American compliments. She points out that responding to compliments is constrained by two seemingly contradictory conditions: Agreeing with the complimenter and Avoiding self-praise (1978:81-2). In her terms, these two conditions have to be met at the same time, thus presenting difficulties to the complimentee because trying to meet either of the conditions will inevitably conflict with the other. She divides American compliment responses into acceptances, agreements, rejections and disagreements. Following the conversational principles, people must respond to the other's compliment. In English-spoken countries, people usually receive it and accept it with the polite "Thank you". But not all the compliments would be accepted in people's daily life. There are mainly two kinds of strategies for people to use in their lives: preferred and dispreferred, i.e. agreement and disagreement.
　　4.1.1Agreement
　　According to Pomerantz's(1978)research, in English speech act of compliment there are mainly two kinds of response strategies: Agreement and Disagreement. And the strategy of agreement can be divided into six subcategories as follows:
　　1 Appreciation Token i.e. to agree with the complimenter by saying thank you or smiling, e.g.
　　Female 1: I really like that shirt.
　　Female 2: Thanks.
　　2 Comment Acceptance i.e. to show agreement, e.g.
　　Female 1: I like your hair long.
　　 Female 2: Me too. I am never getting cut again.
　　3 Praise Upgrade i.e. to accept the compliment and conduct self-praise, e.g.
　　Male 1: Looks like a good tan this year.
　　Male 2: Thanks. Kinda makes me look even more handsome, doesn't it?
　　4 Comment History, e.g.
　　Female 1: I like your shoes. They are cute.
　　Female 2: I got these two years ago. My dress shoes wore out, so I went to the mall with twenty dollars and got these, and everybody was telling men how dumb I was to get clogs in winter, but I sure wear them a lot.
　　5 Reassignment i.e.to accept the compliment and then transfer it to the third person or things, e.g.
　　Female 1: That's a beautiful necklace.
　　Female 2: It was my grandmother's.
　　6 Return i.e.to accept the compliment and compliment the other side at the same time, e.g.
　　Female 1: I like your shirt.
　　Female 2: Thanks. I like yours, too.
　　The above examples can be explained by Leech's (1983) Agreement Maxim: minimize disagreements between self and others and maximize agreement between self and others.
　　4.1.2Disagreement
　　The disagreement strategies can be divided into six subcategories as follows:
　　1 Scale Down i.e.to show disagreement with the complimenter, e.g.
　　Female 1: That's a nice watch.
　　Female 2: It's all scratched up and I'm getting a new one.
　　2 Question. (To express doubt about the compliment) For example:
　　Female 1: That's a nice outfit.
　　Female 2: What? Are you kidding?
　　3 Disagreement i.e.to deny the compliment, e.g.
　　Female: Charlie, your haircut looks nice.
　　Male: Bullshit! She cut it too short.
　　4 Qualification, e.g.
　　Male: I like your haircut.
　　Female: But I wanted it even shorter.
　　5 No acknowledgement, e.g.
　　Male 1: That's a beautiful sweater.
　　Male 2: Did you finish the assignment for today?
　　6 Request Interpretation i.e. to interpret the compliment into a request, e.g.
　　Male 1: That's a nice bike.
　　Male 2: Let me know if you want to borrow it?
　　From the above examples we can infer that although native English speakers would show non-agreement among friends, acquaintances or people with equal social status, they usually tend to accept the compliment by saying something like "Thank you" to illustrate his or her appreciation of the praise. To have a better understanding of the cross-cultural communication, it is also necessary to make a further discussion of Chinese compliment response strategies.
　　4.2Chinese compliment response strategies
　　The study of Chinese speech act of compliment has observed 103 verbal responses plus 22 non-verbal ones. These verbal responses can be roughly categorized into three subcategories: Accepting, Avoiding and Rejecting or Acceptance, Acceptance with Amendment and Non-acceptance. In fact, a careful examination of Ye's sub-categories under Acceptance with Amendment, like Downgrade, Comment, Confirmation, Magnification, Transfer and Return, shows that these strategies are intended to respond to the compliments indirectly, avoiding either accepting the compliments directly or disagreeing with the complimenter substantially. Chinese compliment response strategies can be diagrammed in table 4-1.
　　Table 4-1 Percentage of Chinese Compliment Response Types
　　
　　Table 4-1 shows that the Chinese compliment response types in the present data are similar to Ye's (1995) findings. The super-strategy Avoiding makes up 57.28% of the whole data, even 10% higher than Ye's Acceptance with Amendment. The most frequently used strategies under this category are Confirmation, Comment and Downgrade. Look at the following responses:
　　1 Shi ma? Lifa shi gei wo sheji de. (是吗?理发师给我设计的。)
　　Really? The hairdresser designed the style for me.
　　2 Zhen de ma? Ni zhen de zhemo renwei ma? (真的吗,你真的这么认为吗?)
　　(Is it) really? Do you really think so?
　　3 Nali, nali. Bi beifang de tongzhi cha yuan le. (哪里,哪里,比北方的同志差远了。)
　　No, no. (My Mandarin is) far from comrades from the North.
　　4 Zhen de ma? Xiexie. 真的吗?谢谢。
　　Really? Thank you.
　　As shown, each of these responses involves different strategies. The first is in combination of Confirmation with Comment; the third, a combination of Confirmation, Comment and Downgrade; the fourth, a combination of Rejecting and Downgrade; the fifth, a combination of Confirmation and Thanking. Thus the speech act of compliment is not simply a compliment-response interaction in real life. It can appear in a multiple-round conversation with insertion sequences. The comment part in the response may easily lead to some other topics. For example:
　　5 Xiao Wang, ni chuan shang zhe qunzi zhen piaoliang. 小王,你穿上这裙子真漂亮。
　　Xiao Wang, you look very beautiful in the skirt.
　　Zhen de ma? Na tian zai baihuo daou mai de. 真的吗?那天在百货大楼买的。
　　Really? ( I ) bought it in the department store.
　　Duoshao qian mai de? Wo ye xiang mai yijian.多少钱买的,我也想买一双。
　　How much was that? I want to buy one, too.
　　Yibai wushi kuai qian.一百五十块钱。
　　150 yuan.
　　Zai na jia shangchang mai de? 在哪家商场买的?
　　In which department store?
　　Zai Yi Bai. 在一百。
　　In No. 1 Department Store.
　　Here the complimenter has turned the compliment into information requesting. Thus, complimenting may serve to start or change the topic of conversations. Strategies of Rejecting and Accepting make up almost a similar percentage in this set of Chinese data, accounting for,20.39% and 22.33% of all the response types respectively. One outstanding characteristic of the Rejecting strategy is that most of the responses are combinations of a few rejecting formulas and other strategies. It seems that Chinese speakers seldom reject a compliment simply with a formula meaning a flat "no". This is different from what people from outside the Chinese language and culture generally believe. Some of these rejecting formulas are nali nali(哪里,哪里), suan le ba(算了吧), cha yuan le(差远了), buxing(不行), guojiang le(过奖了), buhaoyisi(不好意思)and mama huhu(马马虎虎), etc. These terms generally mean "no. I'm not that good. I don't deserve your praise". They need to be understood culture-specifically because the English translation can hardly convey what each of them means in specific situations. Take buhaoyisi and buxing buxing for example. The closest English equivalent of buhaoyisi is "I am embarrassed". However, buhaoyisi is never so strong in the sense of (embarrassment) from the speaker's part. It is simply something of an automatic reaction when complimented. The complimentee's reaction may be "I know I am complimented and I should not show that I am arrogant or self-conceited, so I just say buhaoyisi"。Buxing is another phrase frequently used as the response to the other's praise, but weaker than the English translation "no, no". Besides it always used with a repetition, thus Buxing buxing comes to be a ritual denial. Interesting enough, all of these phrases can be used only by those who have really achieved the potential status or quality.Otherwise, the complimentee tends to be boasting or arrogant, and hence violating the social value of modesty. The motivation of the Chinese compliment responses can be explained by Leech's (1983) Modesty Maxim: minimize praise of self and maximize dispraise of self.
　　One distinctive feature of these rejecting formulas is, what the complimentee denies is only the quality of the object or content of the compliment, but not the illocutionary force of complimenting. As Ye put it, the formulaic denial is not a real denial in the sense of rejecting the compliment. Rather, it has the function of letting the compliment pass. The speaker denies the proposition but accepts the complimenting force, thus emphasizing the value of modesty (1995: 272). This shows, at least in the target group of Chinese speakers (although they may have well been influenced by their English competence), the myth that "no matter how pleased Chinese people may feel upon hearing a compliment, they must withhold any expressions of gratitude or delight" (Young, 1987:26) can be misleading in understanding Chinese behaviors in such situations.
　　Ⅴ. Conclusion
　　This paper has attempted to explore the differences of the speech act of compliment between English and Chinese. So in the first part of the paper, it presents a series of studies on the functions of compliment in both English and Chinese cultures. In the second part, the paper focuses on the different pragmatic formulas between English and Chinese. And they are very helpful for the readers in cross-cultural communication. In the third part, the paper shows different compliment response strategies between English and Chinese. From this part we can know that native English speakers usually tend to accept the compliment. But on the contrary, most of the Chinese people tend to reject the compliment. So one should bear in mind that the speech act of compliment, compliment formulas and responses are depend on the shared beliefs and values of the speech community. From this paper we can infer that social customs vary from culture to culture, so language learners of English should have the sense of pragmatics.
　　However, this paper is conducted in a highly restricted situation. The conclusions are not expected to be generalized. So in the part of Chinese speech act of compliment more studies are expected.
　　
　　References
　　
　　Holmes, J. (1986). Compliments and compliment responses in New Zealand English. Anthropological linguistics, Vol.28, pp. 485-508
　　Holmes, J. (1988). Paying compliments: a sex-preferential politeness strategy. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 12, No. 4, pp. 445-465
　　Holmes, J. & Brown, D. F. (1987). Teachers and students learning about compliments. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 523-546
　　Leech, G. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman
　　Manes, J. & Wolfson, N. (1981). The compliment formula. In F. Coumas (ed), conversational routine: explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. pp 115-132
　　Matsuoka, Rieko. (2003). Gender variation in explicitness of proffering compliments. 
　　http://www.jalt.org/pansig/2003/HTML/Matsuoka.htm. (20 June 2004).
　　Pomerantz, A. (1978). Compliment responses: notes on the cooperation of multiple constraints. in J. Schenkein (ed), studies in the organization of conversational interactions. New York: Academic Press. pp 79-112
　　Ye, L. (1995). Complimenting in Mandarin Chinese. In Kasper, G. (ed), Pragmatics of Chinese as native and target language. Manon: University of Hawaii, pp. 207-302
　　Yule, George. (2000). Pragmatics. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language and Education Press.
　　Yound, S. (1987). A Comparison between Chinese and American cultures in forms of address, greetings, farewells and compliments. Cross Currents, Vol. 13, pp.13-28
　　Zhang, Ai-lin. (2003). Intercultural communication. Chongqing: Chongqing University Press.