1．Introduction 1
2. Overview of compliments from the perspective of theory 2
2.1 Austin’s speech act theory 2
2.2 Politeness principle 3
3. Contrastive study on English compliments and Chinese compliments 6
3.1 Compliment linguistic forms 6
3.2 Topics of compliment 11
3.3 Compliment responses 13
3.4 Social functions 16
4．Conclusion 17
Acknowledgements 18
References 19
ABSTRACT
Complimenting, said to be a social “lubricant”, is a positive and frequently used speech act. Nearly all the compliment cases including compliment responses in this paper come originally from Chinese and English movie clips and TV series, a few from some famous linguist’s works. This study focuses on compliments from a cross-cultural perspective, comparing and analyzing compliment speech act in English and Chinese cultures in terms of syntactic level, semantic level, compliment topic, compliment response, along with implied cultural factors. These studies aim to provide a good understanding of how to perform and accept compliments appropriately in different cultural backgrounds.
The cultural differences between Chinese and English contexts are fully reflected by the differences between the two compliment sets, which helps people understand the different cultural backgrounds better, hence to improve their intercultural communicative competence, especially that of how to give and receive compliments properly on intercultural occasions.
Key words：compliment; cross cultural communication; cultural differences
