11。no acknowledgement [silence]

Other Interpretations 12。request You wanna borrow this one too?

(Herbert 79)

 Concerning the social functions of compliment, Wolfson and Manes(1980) pointed out that compliment serve to produce or to reinforce a feeling of solidarity between speakers。 Besides, Wolfson(1981) made a further conclusion :“compliments also serve other functions: they are used in greeting, thanking and apologizing, or even as substitutes for them。 They also serve as a way of opening a conversation” (Walfson 123)。

2。4 Studies on Compliment at Home

Compared with the researchers abroad, Chinese scholars studied on compliments since 1990s, which is relatively late but more various。 One of the Chinese pioneers in compliment is Zou Weicheng (1990) who tried to explore the mechanism of complimenting communication。 And recent years have witnessed the mushrooming of study on compliment in China especially from the cross-cultural perspective。

Among the Chinese scholars, Shi jiawei’s (2000) study is much more comprehensive and systematic。 He paid attention to the topic distribution of Chinese and English compliments and made a clear conclusion of the similar topic distribution of compliment existed in the two cultures: that is about appearance, temperament, ability, possession and achievement。 While the differences are summarized better in Wang Xiaowen’s(2014) study。 She pointed out that “Some private topics that are taboos for public discussion in American English, such as age, salary, marriage, and family can be taken as topics for compliments in Chinese…some topics that can be freely talked in American English become taboos in Chinese。 It’s inappropriate for a Chinese male to compliment an unfamiliar female on her attractiveness whereas an American would consider the same compliment natural” (Wang 164)。

Compared to Herbert’s study on compliment response, Chinese scholar Chen Rong(1993) did a research among the American students from Missouri Valley College and Chinese students from Xi’an Foreign Languages University。 His results are shown in the following two tables。

Table 1 Categorization and distribution of American English

Strategy type % Example

Super strategy

1:Accepting 39。28

1。Thanking 29。50 Thank you。

2。Agreeing 2。95 Thank you。 I feel better than I used to。

3。Expressing gladness 3。00 I am glad you like it。

4。 Joking 3。83 Get yourself a girlfriend that will buy one for you。

Super strategy论文网

2: Returning 18。50

5。 Returning compliments 14。50

6。 Offering object of

compliments 2。60 You can wear it sometimes if you like。

7。 Encouraging 1。40

Super strategy

3: Deflecting 29。50

8。Explaining 23。30 Thanks。 My mom gave it to me。