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A variationist study of compliment responses in Chinese
Author(s) -
Guo Hongjie,
Zhou Qinqin,
Chow Daryl
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/j.1473-4192.2012.00315.x
Subject(s) - politeness , variation (astronomy) , linguistics , sociolinguistics , psychology , mandarin chinese , conjunction (astronomy) , maxim , situated , sociology , social psychology , political science , artificial intelligence , astrophysics , computer science , philosophy , physics , astronomy , law
Building upon the foundation of variationist sociolinguistics and politeness theory, this paper examines the norms and patterns of compliment responses in Mandarin Chinese, and explores the constraints of sociolinguistic variables on the pragmatic variation of this speech act. This study is built on a corpus of 1,190 naturally occurring compliment exchanges collected in the speech community of Shanghai, in conjunction with the interlocutors' ethnographic information. Variable rule analysis is used to identify the factors that contribute to compliment response patterns. The most striking diachronic change revealed by this study lies in the fact that Chinese speakers considerably tend towards the acceptance of compliments while strategies of non‐acceptance are on the decline, as exhibited by the Shanghai speech community. The study also suggests that Chinese speakers appear to be situated in a transitional period from the modesty maxim to the agreement maxim. In addition, the results demonstrated that the pragmatic variable of compliment response varies systematically with social variables such as gender, age, social status, education, social class, social distance, and the use of English. 本篇文章基于社会语言学的变异观和和礼貌理论探讨汉语恭维回应语的模式和准则并分析了多个社会语言学变量对其语用变异的制约作用。本研究共收集上海言语社区1,190个自然语言状态下的恭维语及恭维回应语用例同时还收集了有关语言使用者的相关社会背景信息。研究采用变项规则分析法来分析不同语境因素对汉语恭维回应语的影响。研究结果揭示恭维回应语模式的历时性显著变化是接受型模式越来越普遍而不接受型模式则使用得越来越少这是上海言语社区的一个真实写照。研究表明中国人的礼貌准则正在经历一个由谦虚准则到一致准则过渡的阶段。研究结果还发现恭维语回应语受到各种社会因素如年龄、性别、社会地位、教育程度、社会阶层、社会关系、英语熟练程度等因素的制约而且呈现出一定的系统性。