the Difference of Compliment between Chinese and USA

With the globalization of economic and the developed transportation, build more effective intercultural communication between Chinese and Americans has become more and more broadly and necessarily. Compliment as a speech act plays an important role in the intercultural communication. China falls in High-context category, most western (American) cultures are Low-context (Chen, 1993). People in the

A Study of Cross-Cultural Communication:

Compare the Difference of Compliment between

Chinese and US American

Mr. Hongwen Xu (Nate)

ID: 5215212054

Individual Study II

Prof. Thomas J. Knutson, Ph.D.

Professor of Communication Studies California State University,

Sacramento

Ramkhamhaeng University, The Institute of International Studies

With the globalization of economic and the developed transportation, build more effective intercultural communication between Chinese and Americans has become more and more broadly and necessarily. Compliment as a speech act plays an important role in the intercultural communication. China falls in High-context category, most western (American) cultures are Low-context (Chen, 1993). People in the

Abstract

The object of this paper is by comparing and contrasting native Chinese and native American-English speakers performances in speech act, then, put forward the differences in compliment between these two nations. The analysis will focus on the 3 topics: 1) Compliment function; 2) Compliment giving; 3) Compliment response.

Key words: Cross-culture communication, compliment, politeness

Introduce and background

With the globalization of economic and the developed transportation, build more effective intercultural communication between Chinese and Americans has become more and more broadly and necessarily. Compliment as a speech act plays an important role in the intercultural communication. China falls in High-context category, most western (American) cultures are Low-context (Chen, 1993). People in the High-context, interpretation of message requires close attention to the physical environment in which a conversation occurs, relatively little information is contained in the explicit message. People in Low-context cultures are just opposite, with most of the information is contained in the explicit message (Hall, 1976). With the influence of different cultural norms, the compliment showing a big different in Chinese and American cultures.

Compliment as one of the most import politeness be widely used in the verbal communication, Positive politeness can be expressed in many ways, paying a compliment is one of the most obvious (Holmes, 1996). Holmes s defined that A

With the globalization of economic and the developed transportation, build more effective intercultural communication between Chinese and Americans has become more and more broadly and necessarily. Compliment as a speech act plays an important role in the intercultural communication. China falls in High-context category, most western (American) cultures are Low-context (Chen, 1993). People in the

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, characteristic, skill, etc) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer .(Holmes, 1986). Compliment was used to express something that is good, but in the different cultures, the compliments also different, it may dangerous for one cultural group compliment the other groups (Ming-Chung Yu, 2005), lots of insincere or embarrassing compliments are given in the intercultural communication.

For effectively avoid the misuse of compliment in the intercultural communication, several cultural studies on compliment interactions have been conducted in various speech communities: New Zealand English speakers (Holmes, 1988), South African English speakers (Herbert, 1989), Korean speakers (Han, 1992), English speakers (Daikuhara, 1986), moreover, English-speaking Americans from the West Coast (Pomerantz, 1978), English-speaking Americans from the Midwest and Washington, D.C. (Knapp, Hopper & Bell, 1984), etc. However, cross-cultural studies have paid relatively little attention on native Chinese speaker s speech act behavior (Yu, 1999a). To learn more about such behavior, this paper focus on compliment, compare the difference between the native Chinese and native American-English speakers performances of in compliment. The paper will first discuss the different function of compliment for Chinese and American speakers. And for show the whole picture of compliment differences between China and America, the method of giving a compliment, and compliment response will be discussed separately.

With the globalization of economic and the developed transportation, build more effective intercultural communication between Chinese and Americans has become more and more broadly and necessarily. Compliment as a speech act plays an important role in the intercultural communication. China falls in High-context category, most western (American) cultures are Low-context (Chen, 1993). People in the

The function of Compliment

Compliments are clearly positive politeness devices which express goodwill and solidarity between the speaker and the addressee. But they may serve other functions too. In some contexts, compliments may function as praise and encouragement, like most of American s compliments (Herbert, 1990); And compliment can be regarded as a face-threatening act to extent that it implies the compliment envies the address in some way, or would like to something belonging to the addressee (Brown & Levinson, 1987); Also in some cultures, compliments directed upwards from subordinate to superordinates, on the other hand, are often labeled f …… 此处隐藏：19300字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……