中国英语学习者恭维语应答研究A study of the compliment response of Chinese English learners.pdfVIP

Chapter 1 Introduction This study investigates the compliment respond (CR hereafter) strategies among the Chinese EFL learners. It is an inquiry that falls into the areas of sociolinguistics and empirical pragmatics. 1.1 Background to the study We all give compliments (Cs hereafter) and respond to them occasionally in our daily life. Cs have been said to “grease the social wheels” and thus to serve as “social lubricants” (Wolfson, 1983: 89). A compliment is defined as “a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to some one other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some good (possession, characteristics, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer” (Homes, 1988:446). CRs are “worth studying because, like all speech acts, they can show us the rules of language use in a speech community” (Yuan, 2001:273). Cs and CRs have attracted particular attention from researchers because they not only give insights into the rules of language use in a speech community, but also show the value system of individual speaker as well as the community (Knapp et a1., 1984; Manes, 1983; Wolfson, 1983). Since the 1970s, a considerable number of researches on Cs and CRs have been carried out in different varieties of languages, especially the varieties of English (Herbert, 1989; Holmes, 1986; Chick, 1996; Nelson, Al-Batal and Echols, 1996, etc.). Compared with the studies abroad, studies on compliments in the Chinese context began later. The first contrastive study on CRs in China was carried out by Chinese scholar Chen Rong in 1993. Recent years have seen several empirical based studies on Chinese CR (Gong Xian, 1997; Li Yue’e, 2002; Ye Lei, 1995). However, their findings seem to be confusing and even in conflict with one another. For