Compliments In Taiwan And Mainland Chinese The Influence Of

compliments in taiwan and mainland chinese: the influence of region and compliment topic chih ying lin*, helen woodfield, wei ren gradu

Compliments in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese: The Influence of Region
and Compliment Topic
Chih Ying Lin*, Helen Woodfield, Wei Ren
Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Helen Wodehouse
Building, 35 Berkeley Square, Clifton, BS8 1JA, U.K.
ABSTRACT
========
Situated in a recently established field of variational pragmatics
(Schneider and Barron, 2008), this study investigates one of the
under-researched non-Indo-European languages, Chinese, with regard to
the influence of macro-social and micro-social factors on compliments.
More specifically, the present study focuses on the impact of region,
a macro-social variable, and compliment topic, a micro-social factor,
on Chinese compliments given by Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese
higher education students. Sixty Taiwanese and sixty Mainland Chinese,
equally gendered in each group, completed a written discourse
completion task consisting of eight content-enriched situations
(Billmyer and Varghese, 2000) eliciting compliments. In terms of
regional effect, commonalities emerged between those compliments of
Chinese students in Taiwan and Mainland China. Both groups preferred
to offer ‘explicit compliments’, ‘implicit requests’, ‘implicit
assumptions’, and ‘implicit want statements’ as compliments, with
‘explicit compliments’ emerging as the most popular strategy. On the
other hand, statistically significant differences were identified
between the two groups in a few implicit compliment strategies.
Furthermore, both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese students utilized
several compliment strategies in similar ways across
appearance/possession and performance/ability situations. It appears
that in most cases, it was compliment topic rather than the variety of
Chinese which modulated the compliments by both groups. In addition,
the paper suggests that compliments in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese may
have been undergoing a change, possibly influenced by western
cultures.
Keywords: Chinese compliments, Regional effect, Compliment topic
1.Introduction
==============
In cross-cultural or intercultural pragmatics research, the focus in
recent years has been predominantly on the pragmatic variations
between or across different languages under the influences of
micro-social factors (i.e., social dominance, social distance and
degree of imposition). Relatively little attention has been paid to
the effect of macro-social factors1, such as, region, gender,
ethnicity, age and social class, on different varieties of a language,
either at the national or the sub-national level (Barron and
Schneider, 2009). Research in dialectology has investigated the
systematic impact of social factors on the phonological, grammatical
and lexical levels between different dialects (see Wolfram and
Schilling-Estes, 1998, with respect to varieties of English).
Nevertheless, few studies in either pragmatics or dialectology have
thus far explored the influences of macro-social factors on
intra-lingual variations at the pragmatic level. In light of this
research gap, Schneider and Barron (2008) have established a new
sub-field of pragmatics, variational pragmatics (henceforth VP), which
is thus situated at the interface of pragmatics with dialectology.
This new sub-discipline aims to explore the effect of macro-social
factors on intra-lingual pragmatic conventions. As Barron and
Schneider (2009:425) indicate, “pragmatic similarities may occur
across languages, while pragmatic differences may occur across
varieties of the same language”.
Of the existing variational pragmatics research, discussions have
essentially drawn on the varieties of Indo-European languages, for
example, English (Holmes and Brown, 1987; Creese, 1991; Breuer and
Geluykens, 2007; Barron, 2008), Spanish (Márquez-Reiter, 2003;
Placencia, 2008; Félix-Brasdefer, 2009, 2010b), German (Muhr, 2008;
Warga, 2008), French (Schölmberger, 2008), and Dutch (Plevoets et al.,
2008). Even in Schneider and Barron’s recently published (2008)
edition of variational pragmatics, none of the papers dealt with the
national or sub-national varieties of non-Indo-European languages, for
instance, Chinese and Japanese. To our knowledge, there have been two
studies thus far involving Chinese speakers with the focus on
pragmatic variations. Bresnahan et al. (1999) investigated how Chinese
native speakers in Singapore and Taiwan responded to a friend’s
requests at different levels of imposition. Spencer-Oatey et al.
(2008) conducted a study on the evaluation of compliment response
strategies by university students in Britain, Mainland China and Hong
Kong. Intra-lingual variations in Chinese were identified between
Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong respondents in the judgements of
disagreement responses.
Responding to the call for more variational pragmatics research,
especially on non-Indo-European languages, this study examines the
effect of both macro-social and micro-social factors on compliment
giving in two varieties of Chinese. More specifically, the study has
two objectives: first, to investigate regional differences in
compliments given by Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese
college/university students, that is, the impact of region
(macro-social factor) on Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese
compliments. Second, the paper aims to explore the extent to which
such compliments vary according to the interplay of the region
variable with a micro-social factor, the topic of compliments.
As compliments may reflect societal values, the issue of what counts
as an acceptable topic varies from culture to culture. Several general
topic categories have been identified across languages (Wolfson, 1983,
1989; Knapp et al., 1984; Daikuhara, 1986; Holmes, 1986, 1988, 1995;
Wang and Tsai, 2003; Yu, 2005): these have involved
appearance/possession, performance/ability and personality traits,
with the first two categories occurring most in the above mentioned
studies. The topics of compliments seem to be commonly shared across
different cultures; however, each culture has its preferences for, or
acceptance of, certain topic categories and specific attributes within
the categories. For example, possession compliments in American
English included those relating to children and spouses (Wolfson,
1983; Knapp et al., 1984). Nevertheless, such compliments were
regarded as inappropriate in New Zealand English (Holmes and Brown,
1987). Holmes and Brown (1987) indicated that in New Zealand, it was
unacceptable to compliment a man on his wife in that this reflected a
view of his wife as a possession. This example reveals cross-cultural
differences in the perceptions of appropriate compliment topics. The
present study thus takes a dual focus, namely, the influence of (a)
region and (b) compliment topic on Chinese compliments. A written
discourse completion task (henceforth DCT) was employed to investigate
Taiwan and Mainland Chinese students’ perceptions of appropriate
complimenting behavior, aiming to address the following two research
questions:
1.
To what extent does the overall preference for compliment
strategies by Taiwan Chinese differ from that by Mainland Chinese?
2.
With regard to situational variations, when giving compliments in
appearance/possession and performance/ability situations, to what
extent do compliment strategies by Taiwan Chinese differ from
those by Mainland Chinese?
This paper starts with an overview of empirical studies which
investigate Chinese compliments. Next, the methodological issues are
addressed with regard to variational pragmatics in general and the
present study in particular, including the participants, the
instrument, coding scheme and data analysis. The results are discussed
in relation to implications for compliments in Taiwan and Mainland
Chinese on the basis of changes observed in appropriate complimenting
performance. The final section concludes with a summary of findings
and suggestions for future research.
2.Compliments
=============
Holmes (1988:446) observes that “a 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”. Following this definition, compliments serve as a
positive politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson, 1987) to satisfy the
hearer’s positive face wants. However, compliment receivers might
sometimes experience compliments as negative or face-threatening. In
some cultures like Samoan (Holmes, 1986, 1988) and Chinese (Ye, 1995;
Wang and Tsai, 2003; Yu, 2005), compliments might imply for the hearer
an element of envy or desire of the complimented object and might,
therefore, be interpreted as an indirect request that violates the
hearer’s face. An in-depth study of a speech act, like compliments,
not only reveals the rules of speaking in a speech community but also
offers insights into the value system of an individual and the
community (Wolfson, 1981, 1989). Compared with a number of compliment
studies in different varieties of English and other western languages
(Manes and Wolfson, 1981; Knapp et al., 1984; Wolfson, 1984, 1989;
Holmes, 1988, 1995; Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989; Herbert, 1989, 1990;
Parisi and Wogan, 2006), Chinese compliments have received relatively
little attention in the literature. The four major studies comprise
Ye’s (1995), Yuan’s (2002), Wang and Tsai’s (2003) and Yu’s (2005)
research, with the first two studies focusing on Mainland Chinese, the
third one on Taiwan Chinese and the last study comparing Taiwan
Chinese with American English compliments.
2.1.Previous research on Mainland Chinese compliments
-----------------------------------------------------
Ye (1995) investigated the effects of topic and gender on compliments
and compliment responses in Mainland Chinese. In this study,
compliments were further explored in terms of strategies, semantic
items, compliment focus and functions. A DCT composed of 16 situations
was conducted with 96 Mainland Chinese. The findings indicated that
Chinese native speakers in Mainland China preferred to give ‘explicit
compliments’. Furthermore, more ‘explicit compliments’ and fewer
non-complimentary remarks were evident in performance-related
situations compared with appearance contexts. It was concluded that
compliments for performance were preferred and more acceptable by
Mainland Chinese. Moreover, Ye (1995) suggested that compliments might
create rather than reduce the distance between the interlocutors. This
assumption contradicts the function of compliments in English
varieties (Wolfson, 1983; Holmes, 1988), namely, to consolidate or
increase solidarity between the speaker and the hearer, but lends
support to Daikuhara’s (1986) investigation of Japanese compliments in
which it was observed that compliments sometimes signify deference and
thus create social distance while at the same time maintaining
solidarity.
Yuan (2002) employed multiple methods to explore compliments and
compliment responses in Kunming Chinese, a dialect spoken in Kunming,
Mainland China. Oral and written DCTs, designed based on natural
observation data, were administered to 175 informants of three age
groups, three education levels and two gender groups to provide a
complete picture of compliments as a speech event in Kunming Chinese.
Interviews were conducted with some respondents who accomplished an
oral DCT to elicit their perceptions and intentions of compliments.
Similar to Ye’s (1995) finding, Kunming speakers tended to pay
‘explicit compliments’ in the majority of the situations in both DCT
and observation data. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that some cases of
opt-outs and non-complimentary remarks were identified in both Ye’s
(1995) and Yuan’s (2002) DCT data. Although the DCT might not reflect
language use in natural settings (Yuan, 2002; Golato, 2003; Woodfield,
2008; Jucker, 2009), the occurrence of opt-outs indicated that some
Chinese speakers might choose not to express their positive intentions
in some situations where a compliment is expected.
2.2.Previous research on Taiwan Chinese compliments
---------------------------------------------------
Wang and Tsai (2003) investigated compliments and compliment responses
by Taiwanese college students, adopting ethnographic observation
(Manes and Wolfson, 1981). In particular, they examined the syntactic
and semantic structures of compliments, compliment topics and
compliment responses in relation to the gender of the speaker and the
hearer. A total of 454 natural compliments and compliment responses
were recorded. The results showed that appearance was the most common
topic in either cross-gender or same-gender interactions except that
females were more likely to compliment men on their
performance/ability instead of their appearance. The popularity of
appearance compliments among Taiwan college students was contradictory
to Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies on Mainland Chinese speakers
in which performance was a preferred topic of compliments. Appearance
and ability compliments accounted for 22.7% and 25.4% of the
compliments respectively based on the observation data in Yuan’s
(2002) research and 45.2% and 28.2% of the compliments respectively in
Wang and Tsai’s (2003) study. Compliments on appearance were much less
common in Mainland Chinese than Taiwan Chinese whereas performance
compliments were equally frequent in these two Chinese varieties. In
addition, based on compliments and compliment responses by Taiwanese
students, Wang and Tsai (2003) suggested that Chinese compliments
normally have a positive effect on interpersonal relations, for
instance, to reinforce solidarity, to maintain rapport, or to attend
to the addressee’s positive face wants. This is in sharp contrast to
Ye’s (1995) conclusion which suggested that such speech acts create a
distance between people of close relationship.
Yu (2005) also employed ethnographic observation to investigate Taiwan
Chinese and American English speakers’ compliments by analyzing the
distribution of compliments, their functions, compliment topics and
addresser-addressee relationship as well as the issue of cultural
universality versus specificity. A total of 410 compliment exchanges
were produced by 356 Taiwan Chinese participants and 789 compliment
exchanges by 636 Americans. All of the compliments in Yu’s (2005)
study occurred in ordinary conversations between people of various
occupations, ages, statuses and relationships while the compliment
data in Wang and Tsai’s (2003) study mostly appeared between
undergraduates or graduates and their peers, namely, the student
community. In Yu’s (2005) research, Taiwan Chinese speakers were
observed to offer significantly fewer compliments than their American
counterparts. Direct compliments were the most frequent strategy for
the two groups of speakers while Taiwan Chinese produced indirect
compliments proportionally more than Americans. Compared with Wang and
Tsai’s (2003) evidence described above, there were differences in
compliment functions and topics in Taiwan Chinese compliments. First,
in Yu’s (2005) study, Taiwan Chinese tended to compliment on
performance/ability while appearance compliments were more popular in
Wang and Tsai’s (2003) data. Second, Yu (2005) stated that in Chinese
culture, compliments were mainly employed as assertions of admiration
whereas Wang and Tsai (2003) suggested that Taiwan Chinese students
offered compliments to establish solidarity or rapport.
In brief, these four studies on Mainland, Kunming and Taiwan Chinese
compliments demonstrate intra-lingual variations in several respects
with regard to compliment strategies, topics of compliments and
functions of compliments. The findings lend support to Barron and
Schneider’s (2009) claim that pragmatic variations do indeed exist
between varieties of the same language. Furthermore, there is some
evidence to suggest that speakers of the same language variety do not
necessarily utilize the language variety in the same way.
3.Method
========
With respect to the methodology underlying variational pragmatics,
three principles were addressed by Barron and Schneider (2009). The
first principle is the contrastivity principle, defined as follows:
“linguistic features can be considered variety-specific only if the
variety under study is contrasted with at least one other variety of
the same kind and of the same language” (Barron and Schneider,
2009:429). In other words, at least two varieties of a language have
to be contrasted in order to establish which features or values are
preferred in one specific variety. Second, it is essential that
studies are conducted empirically instead of relying on researchers’
or others’ intuitions or recalled experiences. The types of such
empirical data may consist of both elicited and naturally occurring
conversations, with each having its own advantages and limitations
(Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 2005). Again, the choice of methods
should shed light on the issues under investigation (Félix-Brasdefer,
2010a). As the aim of variational pragmatics is to study the impact of
macro-social factors on language in interaction, those experimental
methods are favored which allow a certain control of variables.
Although the conception of social factors as stable might be
criticized by reductionism, the experimental design ensures
replicability and comparability between studies in the early stage of
variational pragmatics. Barron and Schneider (2009) suggest that the
more systematically the variables are controlled, the more different
varieties can be contrasted and variety-exclusive features can be
identified. In this sense, comparability is the third methodological
principle. In short, the three methodological rules of thumb in
variational pragmatics are that two or more varieties of a language
are contrasted (contrastive) by collecting empirical data (empirical)
in experimental (comparable) research designs. In the present study, a
written discourse completion task was designed to elicit empirical and
comparable data from two contrastive varieties of Mandarin Chinese,
namely, Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese. The profile of the
participants and the nature of the elicitation instrument are
discussed respectively in detail in the following sections 3.1 and
3.2.
3.1.Participants
----------------
Two groups of participants took part in the present study: 60 Taiwan
Chinese and 60 Mainland Chinese2, to follow the contrastivity
principle noted earlier. That is, two varieties of Mandarin Chinese
were the focus of the study, Taiwan and Mainland Chinese. The former
was elicited from students at a college in the central part of Taiwan
and the latter from learners at a university in the Shandong province
in Mainland China. In other words, there were a total of 120
Chinese-speaking college/university students, aged between 19 and 23
years with an average age of 21.4 years. Furthermore, all learners
were sampled from a pool of non-English majors to exclude the possible
influence of another language/culture on compliment production.
Mandarin Chinese served as the native language for both groups of the
respondents. Moreover, there were an equal number of male and female
participants in each group. According to the above description of the
participants, such variables as educational level, field of study, and
gender were controlled to ensure the homogeneity of the participants.
In other words, the respondents in the present study were equally
gendered and they were all non-English-major students from the same
level of educational background (e.g., college or university).
3.2.Instrument
--------------
The compliments from Taiwan and Mainland Chinese participants were
elicited from a written discourse completion task. This instrument has
been commonly employed in cross-cultural or intercultural pragmatics
research but also widely discussed and criticized. Due to its
non-interactive and inconsequential nature (Bardovi-Harlig and
Hartford, 2005), the DCT cannot examine conversational features
typical in spoken discourse, for instance, turn-taking, negotiations
between interlocutors, and paralinguistic or non-verbal resources
(Yuan, 2001; Kasper, 2008; Woodfield, 2008). More importantly, its
decontexualized design (Kasper, 2008) does not yield actual language
use in face-to-face communication but participants’ beliefs about
pragmatic appropriacy (Yuan, 2002; Golato, 2003; Jucker, 2009). In
spite of its limitations, the DCT provides large samples of highly
controlled data in a short period of time (Bardovi-Harlig and
Hartford, 2005). Furthermore, its replicability allows a comparison of
speech act(s) across various languages or varieties of a language. The
advantages of the DCT are in keeping with two of the methodological
principles proposed by Barron and Schneider (2009), namely, the
employment of empirical and comparable data. Consequently, the DCT
serves as an appropriate methodological tool in the present study as
it focuses on participant perceptions of appropriate production,
allows for control of variables, and offers initial insights into how
compliments were realized in different varieties of Chinese, a topic
currently under-researched in variational pragmatics.
The present study formed part of a larger research project which
investigated a combination of three speech acts including compliments,
refusals and requests in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese. There were 20
situations in total consisting of 8 compliments, 8 refusals and 4
requests. It was thought that the inclusion of three speech acts could
prevent the respondents from assuming that all situations were
associated with a specific speech act, thus producing invalid
responses. Moreover, the number of situations in the current study was
at a mid-point between the 16 items in Ye’s (1995) DCT and the 24
items in Yuan’s (2002) DCT. In other words, the 20 situations in the
present DCT were comparable to the DCTs in Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s
(2002) studies.
The DCT in the current study was an open written questionnaire without
a dialogue (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 1993) or a rejoinder
(Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Rose, 1992; Johnston et al., 1998). The
participants read situational descriptions and provided written
responses. According to Billmyer and Varghese (2000), content-enriched
DCTs elicit more elaboration which is more likely to be identified in
authentic data than content-poor prompts. Accordingly, each situation
contained the following information: the name and gender of the
interlocutor, the relationship with the interlocutor, the length of
acquaintanceship, the frequency of interaction, and the setting.
Furthermore, compliment situations were based on two major topics,
appearance/possession and performance/ability, in line with previous
studies (Yuan, 2002; Wang and Tsai, 2003). Following Knapp et al.’s
(1984) definitions, appearance/possession-related compliments are
associated with the addressee’s physical attributes and features and
items of ownership. On the other hand, performance/ability compliments
are those which signal the approval of someone’s skills or abilities,
for example, academic or work performance (Knapp et al., 1984). Under
each topic, two situations were created in which compliments would be
directed towards interlocutors of the same and opposite gender
respectively. Hence, there were a total of eight situations (see
Appendix A for the version for Taiwanese students). Table 1 provides a
synopsis of the compliment scenarios. Compliment topics and the gender
of the addressee were the two independent variables in the design of
the DCT. This paper focuses on the impact of compliment topic on
compliment strategies in Chinese.
Table 1
Descriptions of compliment situations.
Compliment situation
Compliment topic
Gender of the addressee
1. Mobile phone
appearance/possession
male
2. Class presentation
performance/ability
female
3. Hairstyle
appearance/possession
male
4. Handbag
appearance/possession
female
5. Basketball competition
performance/ability
male
6. Weight loss
appearance/possession
female
7. PE test
performance/ability
male
8. Talent show
performance/ability
female
As the respondents of the present study were all students, the
situations were designed to reflect student life. Though the
participants might not have the same or similar experiences described
in the situations, they did not have to place themselves in a
different social role, for instance, a professor or an employer.
Bonikowska (1988) states that it is problematic to require respondents
to adopt a role with which they are not familiar and base any
conclusions on their linguistic performance. In this regard, all
informants were required to maintain their original role of a student.
Furthermore, Chinese compliments tend to occur between people of equal
status (Wang and Tsai, 2003; Yu, 2005) and between casual friends (Yu,
2005). Therefore, the situations were controlled for two variables:
social dominance and social distance. Participants (S) were considered
to be social equals with their (hypothetical) interlocutor (H) as both
were students and casual friends: thus both social dominance and
social distance were configured as S=H across the eight situations.
There were two versions of the DCT as Taiwan and Mainland Chinese used
different forms of the characters in Chinese. One version was written
in traditional Chinese for Taiwanese students and the other in
simplified Chinese for students in Mainland China. A sample situation
from the Mainland Chinese version is provided at the end of Appendix
A. Each version was checked by two researchers from the corresponding
regions and also cross-checked by a person from the other region to
ensure the agreement between the two versions. The DCT was then
modified according to their feedback and piloted before the current
study was implemented.
3.3.Coding scheme
-----------------
The responses from the DCT data were classified into three main
categories, ‘explicit compliments’, ‘implicit compliments’ and ‘opt-outs’.
Explicit compliments are generally direct and unambiguous positive
remarks that contain at least one positive semantic carrier (Ye, 1995;
Yuan, 2002; Yu, 2005). On the other hand, implicit compliments,
without a positive lexical item at the level of linguistic form (Ye,
1995; Yu, 2005), require more inferences from the addressee to
reconstruct the implicated meaning (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989; Yu,
2005). For example, a male speaker compliments a female friend’s
handbag by saying, “Nǐ de bāobāo hǎo piàoliàng ā! Wǒ yě xiǎng gěi wǒ
nǚpéngyǒu mǎi gè le” 你的包包好漂亮啊! 我也想給我女朋友买个了3 (Your handbag is so
pretty! I would like to buy one for my girlfriend). The first sentence
“Nǐ de bāobāo hǎo piàoliàng ā!” 你的包包好漂亮啊 (Your handbag is so pretty)
is coded as an ‘explicit compliment’ because of the positive adjective
“piàoliàng” 漂亮 (pretty). The second utterance “Wǒ yě xiǎng gěi wǒ
nǚpéngyǒu mǎi gè le” 我也想給我女朋友买个了(I would like to buy one for my
girlfriend), while not including any positive lexical items, carries
complimentary force in that people normally buy things that are good
(Yuan, 2002) and the male speaker of this utterance likes the handbag
and might intend to please his girlfriend by sending her the handbag
as a gift. Hence, the sentence “Wǒ yě xiǎng gěi wǒ nǚpéngyǒu mǎi gè le”
我也想給我女朋友买个了 (I would like to buy one for my girlfriend) is categorized
as an ‘implicit compliment’ on the handbag. Following Yuan’s (2002)
coding scheme, both ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’
were head acts in the present study. That is, ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit
compliments’ could appear alone, independently from each other. ‘Implicit
compliments’ did not replace ‘explicit compliments’ nor become
supporting moves when they co-occurred with ‘explicit compliments’.
Based on the current data, ‘implicit compliments’ were further
categorized into eight types. Three categories were adapted from
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s (1989) and Yuan’s (2002) studies. They
consisted of ‘implicit contrast’, ‘implicit explanation’ and ‘implicit
request’ compliments. The remaining five strategies emerged from the
present data and were composed of ‘implicit admiration’, ‘implicit
assumption’, ‘implicit evaluation’, ‘implicit joke’ and ‘implicit want
statement’ compliments. That is, these eight compliment strategies
were generated both inductively and deductively. The definition of
each implicit compliment strategy is provided in Table 2 with the
examples in italics.
A few respondents chose to say nothing; in this case, their responses
were coded as ‘opt-outs’. Replies other than compliments, for
instance, greetings, address terms, or non-complimentary remarks, were
excluded in the data analysis. For example, in the Mobile Phone
situation, one student replied by saying, “Zhè shǒujī shì xīn de ma?
Hǎo piàoliàng ā!” 这手机是新的吗? 好漂亮啊 (Is this a new mobile phone? [It
looks] very nice). The first sentence “Zhè shǒujī shì xīn de ma?”
这手机是新的吗? (Is this a new mobile phone?) signals a notice of a new item
from the addressee but does not have any complimentary meaning; hence,
it was not included for data analysis but the second utterance “Hǎo
piàoliàng ā!” 好漂亮啊 ([It looks] very nice) was coded as ‘explicit
compliment’. An equal number of DCT completed by male and female
participants were selected randomly from the two regions and
independently coded by another researcher who was initially given the
definitions and examples of all compliment strategies. When there were
differences in coding, the two raters discussed and reached an
agreement. The Kappa statistic was performed to determine the
consistency between the two raters. The inter-rater reliability was
found to be K = 0.92 (p < 0.001).
Table 2
The categories of implicit compliment strategies.
Type
Definition & example
Admiration
to show the speaker’s admiration by setting the addressee as a
learning target, e.g., “Wā! Jīntiān nǐ de qǐhuà bàogào de bú cuò. Rúguǒ
kěyǐ, xiǎng gēn nǐ xuéxí yīxià.” 哇! 今天你的企劃報告得不錯. 如果可以, 想跟你學習一下 (Wow!
You did a good presentation today. If possible, I’d like to learn how
to do it [presentation skill] from you.)
Assumption
*
the speaker’s assumption regarding the addressee’s past effort to
produce good performance, e.g., “Wā! Wǒ juéde nǐ de jiǎnbào hěn
bàng ye! Nǐ yīdìng huā hěnduō shíjiān zài zhǔnbèi ba!”哇!
我覺得你的簡報很棒耶! 你一定花很多時間在準備吧! (Wow! I think your presentation was very
good. You must have spent a lot of time preparing for it.)
*
the speaker’s assumption regarding the future good outcome based
on the addressee’s performance, e.g., “Yùtíng, tài bàng le. Kàn
lái dìyīmíng fēi nǐ mò shǔ a!” 玉婷, 太棒了. 看来第一名非你莫属啊! (Yuting,
brilliant! You will definitely get the first prize.) (in the
Talent Show situation)
Contrast
*
the contrast between the addressee and others, e.g., “Biérén pīn
le mìng pǎo cái miǎnqiǎng tōngguò, Kàn nǐ bù fèi lìqì jiù dǎ le
mǎn fēn.” 别人拼了命跑才勉强通过, 看你不费力气就打了满分 (Others ran so hard to barely
pass the test. You got a full mark without much effort.)
*
the contrast between the speaker and the addressee, e.g., “Nǐ tán
de zhēn bàng, wǒ yě tǐng xǐhuān gāngqín de, kě jiù shì méi tiānfèn,
bù huì tán.” 你弹得真棒, 我也挺喜欢钢琴的, 可就是没天分, 不会弹 (You played the piano so
well. I like playing the piano as well, but I don’t have that
talent. I can’t do it.)
Evaluation
to give a complimentary evaluation to assure the addressee’s past
effort, e.g., “Nǐ gāngcái de biǎoyǎn shízài shì tài yōuxiù le, xīnkǔ
de liànxí zǒngsuàn shì yǒu dàijià de.” 你剛才的表演實在是太優秀了, 辛苦的練習總算是有代價的
(Your performance was really awesome. All the hard work paid off.)
Explanation
to describe the good aspects of the addressee’s
appearance/performance, e.g., “Nǐ de bàogào zuò de hěn hǎo ye! Shàngtái
yě dōu bù huì jǐnzhāng, kěyǐ jiāo wǒ rúhé zuò ma?” 你的報告做得很好耶! 上台也都不會緊張,
可以教我如何做嗎? (Your presentation was very good. You were not nervous at
all. Could you teach me how to make a presentation?)
Joke
to express the speaker’s positive intentions in a jokey way, e.g.,
“Wā! Nǐ biàn hǎo zhèng yo! Dà zhèng miē ya! Xiànzài yǒu hěnduō
nánshēng zhuī nǐ hou!” 哇! 妳變好正唷! 大正4咩呀! 現在有很多男生追妳吼! (Wow! You look so
beautiful. [You are] a pretty girl. There must be a lot of men who
have a crush on you.)
Request
to ask the addressee for his/her opinion, advice or experience, or to
request the addressee to do something, for instance, to teach the
speaker some skills, e.g., “Nǐ de bàogào zuò de hěn hǎo ye! Shàng tái
yě dōu bù huì jǐnzhāng, kěyǐ jiāo wǒ rúhé zuò ma?”你的報告做得很好耶! 上台也都不會緊張,
可以教我如何做嗎? (Your presentation was very good. You were not nervous at
all. Could you teach me how to make a presentation?)
Want statement
to show the speaker’s want, wish or interest in the complimented
topic, e.g., “Nǐ zhè gè bāobāo zhēn piàoliàng, wǒ yě xiǎng mǎi yī gè”
你这个包包真漂亮, 我也想买一个 (Your handbag is really pretty. I would like to buy
one as well.)
3.4.Data analysis
-----------------
The compliment data were analyzed by both descriptive and inferential
statistics. Frequencies and percentages were used to identify the most
and least popular strategies by Taiwan and Mainland Chinese (region
variable) and to investigate similarities and differences in the
distribution of compliment strategies by the two groups in
appearance/possession and performance/ability situations (the
interaction between the region variable and the factor of compliment
topic). The frequency of each compliment strategy was calculated based
on its individual occurrences in the data. Using the example of
‘implicit admiration’ compliments in Table 2 (i.e., You did a good
presentation today. If possible, I’d like to learn how to do it
[presentation skill] from you), there was one ‘explicit compliment’
(the first utterance) and one ‘implicit admiration’ compliment (the
second utterance). Regarding inferential statistics, the
Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (the K-S test) and Levene’s test were first
computed to analyze the normality of the data and homogeneity of
variance respectively, two significant assumptions of a parametric
test. The statistics showed that these two assumptions were not met.
In other words, a non-parametric test is a preferred choice to yield
appropriate test results. To test differences between two independent
groups, Mann-Whitney U test, “the non-parametric equivalent of the
independent T-test” (Field, 2009:540), was carried out to examine if
the differences in compliment strategies were significant between
Taiwan and Mainland Chinese (regional difference) with the probability
value set at p < 0.05.
4.Results and discussion
========================
4.1.Regional differences in compliment strategies
-------------------------------------------------
Table 3 presents the frequency and percentage of each compliment
strategy by the two groups of Chinese speakers. Based on the DCT data,
a total of 120 Chinese participants produced 1083 compliments across
the eight situations (516 compliments by Taiwan Chinese and 567
compliments by Mainland Chinese). There were 10 ‘opt-out’ responses, 5
in each group. Put differently, every respondent gave an average of
1.1 compliments in each scenario.
Table 3
Frequencies and percentages of compliment strategies by region.
Compliment strategies
Region
Taiwan
Rank
Mainland China
Rank
Explicit compliments
380 (72.9%)
1
464 (81.1%)
1
Implicit compliments
136 (26.1%)
103 (18.0%)
Admiration
1 (0.2%)
10
10 (2.7%)
5
Assumption
30 (5.8%)
3
21 (3.7%)
3
Contrast
13 (2.5%)
5
13 (2.3%)
6
Evaluation
2 (0.4%)
8
0 (0%)
10
Explanation
2 (0.4%)
8
7 (1.2%)
7
Joke
6 (1.2%)
6
6 (1.0%)
8
Request
52 (10.0%)
2
30 (5.2%)
2
Want statement
30 (5.8%)
3
16 (2.8%)
4
Sub-total
516 (99.0%)
567 (99.1%)
Opt-outs
5 (1.0%)
7
5 (0.9%)
9
Total
521 (100%)
572 (100%)
4.1.1.Explicit compliments
The results indicated that both groups of the respondents preferred
explicitness in their compliment-giving behavior. ‘Explicit
compliments’ were the most popular strategy by Taiwan and Mainland
Chinese across the situations, with Mainland Chinese significantly
more explicit than Taiwanese participants (U = 1073.50, z = -3.87, p <
.001). The ‘explicit compliments’ (81.1%) by Mainland informants were
more than four times as frequent as their ‘implicit compliments’
(18%). Taiwan Chinese tended to pay compliments explicitly as well but
with more frequent use of implicit strategies. The ‘explicit
compliments’ (72.9%) by Taiwan Chinese were 2.5 times more frequent
than their ‘implicit compliments’ (26.1%). In keeping with previous
studies, Chinese speakers were explicit in expressing their positive
intentions (Ye, 1995; Yuan, 2002; Yu, 2005), in similar ways to
American English speakers in Yu’s (2005) study.
4.1.2.Implicit compliments
With respect to implicit compliments, three strategies occurred
frequently in both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese compliment data. These
strategies included ‘implicit requests’, ‘implicit assumptions’, and
‘implicit want statements’ and accounted for 82.4% and 65% of Taiwan
and Mainland Chinese implicit compliments respectively. Clearly, these
three types of implicit compliments were more widely employed by
respondents from Taiwan. The other implicit strategies were relatively
less common in Chinese compliments, especially Taiwan Chinese. For
example, there were only two instances of ‘implicit evaluation’ and
‘implicit explanation’ compliments each in the Taiwanese corpus. These
two strategies also occurred infrequently in the Mainland Chinese
data.
One interesting difference between the Taiwan and Mainland data lies
in the unequal distribution of the strategy of ‘implicit admiration’.
Table 3 shows that all of the ‘implicit admiration’ compliments were
produced by Mainland Chinese students except one by a Taiwan Chinese.
Based on Mann-Whitney U test, the significant differences were
observed only in ‘implicit requests’ (U = 1387.00, z = -2.39, p < .05)
and ‘implicit admirations’ (U = 1559.50, z = -2.64, p < .05) between
Taiwan and Mainland Chinese.
Compliments in various languages have been recognized as a very
routinized speech act as it is normally performed in a limited number
of syntactic and semantic patterns (Manes and Wolfson, 1981; Wolfson,
1984, 1989; Daikuhara, 1986; Holmes, 1986; Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk,
1989). The empirical evidence in the present study suggested that the
compliments by the two regional groups tended to be formulaic in
nature. That is, approximately 93% of Chinese compliments were
realized in either ‘explicit compliments’ or one of the three popular
implicit strategies mentioned above. These four strategies accounted
for 94.4% and 92.8% of compliments by Taiwan Chinese and Mainland
Chinese respectively. This finding is indicative of the formulaic
nature of Chinese compliment strategies, with ‘explicit compliments’
as the most preferred strategy.
4.1.3.Opt-outs
Ten cases of the ‘opt-out’ strategy were equally distributed (around
1%) in both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese responses. Thus, the
difference between the two regions was not statistically significant (U
= 1800.00, z = -.00, ns). Compared with Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002)
studies, a higher percentage of ‘opt-outs’ was identified in their DCT
data, that is, 27.6% in Ye’s and 2.6% in Yuan’s studies. A comparison
of previous research with the current study is provided in Table 4
with respect to the three major compliment strategies: ‘explicit
compliments’, ‘implicit compliments’ and ‘opt-outs’. The compliments
in these three studies were all gathered through DCTs composed of
appearance/possession and performance/ability situations eliciting
compliments to both male and female interlocutors. In other words, the
DCTs in the three studies were designed based on the same independent
variables: compliment topic and the gender of compliment receiver.
Moreover, the compliment situations in the three DCTs were established
to occur between interactants who were both (i) acquaintances and (ii)
of equal status. Though situational descriptions in the DCTs were not
completely the same, their similar designs allow a comparison between
the three studies on Chinese compliments.
Table 4
A comparison of previous relevant research with the present study.
Ye (1995)
Yuan (2002)
The present study
Explicit compliments
65.4%
62%
77.2%
Implicit compliments
7%
4.3%
21.9%
Opt-outs
27.6%
2.6%a
0.9%
a The percentage in Yuan’s (2002) study did not total 100% as the data
comprised not merely explicit and implicit compliments but also
compliments that served as adjuncts or supporting moves. The latter
compliments were not included in the coding scheme of the present
study and thus their percentage was not provided in Table 4.
Based on the results from a limited number of empirical studies, there
is emerging evidence that Chinese speakers’ complimenting behavior may
have been undergoing a change during recent years. First, the
frequencies of ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’ were
similar in Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies as shown in Table 4
but increased dramatically from Yuan’s (2002) data to the present
data. More specifically, the occurrence of ‘explicit compliments’
rises from 62% to 77.2% and ‘implicit compliments’ from 4.3% to 21.9%.
These figures revealed that the Taiwan and Mainland Chinese speakers
in the present study offered ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit
compliments’ considerably more frequently than Mainland Chinese and
Kunming Chinese in Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies respectively.
Second, the ‘opt-out’ strategy has been significantly infrequent since
Yuan’s (2002) study. Chinese speakers seem to be more willing to
express their positive intentions either explicitly or implicitly
instead of refraining from showing their admiration, lending support
to Chang’s (2001) finding that Chinese speakers are not necessarily
reserved in expressing their thoughts, either positive or negative.
This might be due to the impact of western cultures, as indicated by
an interviewee in Yuan’s (2002) research. In this latter study, it was
suggested by the interviewee that nowadays the way Kunming Chinese
complimented others was different from the older generation as they
had been influenced by western civilizations through movies or other
means of mass media. This claim is supported in a recent study by Chen
and Yang (2010), a replication of Chen’s study (1993) on Chinese
compliment responses. These authors noted that Xi’an Chinese in
Mainland China tended to accept instead of reject compliments as they
used to do. A similar changing style has been observed in compliment
responses by Taiwan Chinese (Hsu, 2010). Chen and Yang (2010)
attributed this change to “the influx of Western cultural influences”
as speakers of western languages normally accept compliments (Chen and
Yang, 2010:1951). Moreover, as American English has been the main
English variety for most students in Taiwan and Mainland China, their
cultural values may have been directly or indirectly embedded in
English textbooks or transferred from teachers of American native
speakers, American films or TV programs5. The high frequency of
compliments by Americans has been widely recognized in a number of
studies (Wolfson, 1981; Nelson et al., 1993; Fong, 1998). It is
possible therefore that the young generation might be adopting the
western ways of communication which are deviant from Chinese
traditions. Since all of the respondents in the present study were
college/university students, this might explain why there are
remarkable differences in the frequencies of these three compliment
strategies between the present study and Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002)
studies as shown in Table 4.
To sum up, compared with previous studies, the present study indicated
that an increasing number of Chinese speakers are inclined to express
their positive intentions when compliments are desirable, with most of
them in favor of ‘explicit compliments’. These differences might
result from the influence of western cultures. Moreover, the vast
majority of Chinese compliments were formulaic in terms of the
strategies employed. The participants in Taiwan and Mainland China
preferred to offer ‘explicit compliments’, ‘implicit requests’,
‘implicit assumptions’ and ‘implicit want statements’ as compliments.
Generally, more similarities were identified between Taiwan and
Mainland Chinese speakers with respect to the frequency of compliment
strategies across the situations.
4.2.Situational variations in compliment strategies across regions
------------------------------------------------------------------
4.2.1.Explicit compliments
Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of ‘explicit compliments’
between Taiwan and Mainland Chinese in terms of compliment topics. In
each of the two regions, the explicit strategy was equally employed in
appearance/possession-related and performance/ability-related
situations. Compared with Ye’s (1995) finding, ‘explicit compliments’
were more frequent in the present study (50.5% compared to 43% in Ye’s
study) for appearance/possession situations and less frequent (49.5%
compared to 69.9% in Ye’s study) for performance/ability scenarios. In
Ye’s (1995) study, complimenting on performance seemed to be perceived
as more appropriate than complimenting on appearance due to higher
frequencies of ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’ and
lower occurrences of ‘opt-outs’ and non-complimentary responses in
performance contexts (as noted in section 2.1). Nevertheless, in the
present study, the results suggested that compliment topic did not
influence the frequency of ‘explicit compliments’ in either of the two
groups studied (Fig. 1). This indicated that appearance/possession and
performance/ability were considered to be equally appropriate for the
Chinese respondents in the current study to offer compliments
explicitly.

Fig. 1. The distribution of ‘explicit compliments’ by region and
compliment topics.
4.2.2.Implicit compliments
Detailed analyses of the three popular implicit strategies showed
that, in both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese, ‘implicit request’ and
‘implicit assumption’ compliments mostly appeared in performance-based
situations. This was particularly notable in ‘implicit assumption’
compliments. However, the bulk of ‘implicit want statements’ occurred
in appearance/possession-related contexts as shown in Fig. 2 below. In
particular, ‘implicit requests’ and ‘implicit assumptions’ were more
likely to be employed by Chinese students to compliment their
classmates’ accomplishments in class presentation (situation 2). This
implied that the students in both Taiwan and Mainland China focused
more attention on academic performance by either asking for some
useful information to advance their presentation skills or emphasizing
their peers’ past effort to deliver a successful presentation. The
italicised sentence in the first example below (1) shows how an
‘implicit request’ compliment was offered in the Class Presentation
situation. The instance in (2) is an ‘implicit assumption’ compliment
that implicitly revealed the speaker’s approval of the addressee’s
performance in a talent show.
Fig. 2. The distribution of ‘implicit request’, ‘implicit
assumption’ and ‘implicit want statement’ strategies by region and
compliment topics.
1.
Implicit request: TM106 in the Class Presentation situation
Nǐde
jiǎnbào
hěn
bù
cuò
ō.
Kě
bù
kěyǐ
gēn
wǒ
your
presentation
very
not
bad
PRT7
can
not
can
with
me
shuō
nǐ
dōushì
zěnmó
zhǔnbèi
de
ma?
say
you
always
how
prepare
DE
Q
你的簡報很不錯哦! 可不可以跟我說你都是怎麼準備的嗎?
(Your presentation was very good. Could you tell me how you prepared
for it?)
2.
Implicit assumption: MM15 in the Talent Show situation
Nǐde
biǎoyǎn
tài
bàng
le.
Wǒ
rènwéi
nǐ
your
performance
too
great
PFV
I
think
you
yīdìng
kěyǐ
jìnrù
qián
sān
míng.
definitely
can
enter
first
three
rank
你的表演太棒了, 我认为你一定可以进入前三名.
(Your performance was brilliant. I think you will definitely be one of
the top three.)
Unlike ‘implicit requests’ and ‘implicit assumptions’, ‘implicit want
statements’ were overwhelmingly associated with such possession items
like a mobile phone or a handbag. A typical expression is the example
(3) below which implicitly attributed the credit to the complimented
item, namely, a mobile phone in this case, as people normally buy
things which they evaluate positively (Yuan, 2002). Overall, the
speakers of Taiwan and Mainland Chinese shared some commonalities in
their employment of these three implicit compliment strategies. That
is, they both preferred to offer ‘implicit request’ and ‘implicit
assumption’ compliments in performance-related situations and
‘implicit want statements’ in appearance/possession-related contexts.
3.
Implicit want statement: MF8 in the Mobile Phone situation
Shǒujī
zhēn
piàoliàng!
Yàoshì
wǒ
shǒujī
huài
le,
mobile phone
very
pretty
if
my
mobile phone
broken
PFV
yě
huàn
yī
gè
zhèyàng
de.
Tài
kù
le.
also
change
one
CL
such
DE
too
cool
PFV
手机真漂亮! 要是我手机坏了, 也换一个这样的. 太酷了!
([Your] mobile phone is really wonderful! If mine is broken, I would
like to buy the same one as yours. So cool!)

Fig. 3. The distribution of ‘implicit admiration’ compliments by
region and compliment topics.
Moreover, in the present study, all of the ‘implicit admiration’
compliments were identified in performance-related situations except
one in relation to appearance as shown in Figure 3 above. The
admiration strategy was mainly offered to implicate that the addressee
was a learning model for the speaker. As discussed earlier, most of
the ‘implicit admiration’ compliments were provided by Mainland
Chinese. This suggested that apart from the frequent occurrences of
‘implicit request’ and ‘implicit assumption’ compliments in
performance-related situations, the students in Mainland China were
also inclined to compliment their peers’ achievements by employing the
‘implicit admiration’ strategy. The following example is given from a
Mainland Chinese male respondent in the Basketball Competition
situation.
4.
Implicit admiration: MM20 in the Basketball Competition
situation
Bú
cuò,
bú
cuò,
dǎ
de
zhēn
hǎo!
Jīntiān
méiyǒu
nǐ
Not
bad
not
bad
play
DE
really
well
today
without
you
zhè
chǎng
bǐsài
hái
zhēnde
hěn
nán
shuō
ya!
this
CL
competition
ADV
really
very
hard
say
PRT
Yǐhòu
háiyào
duō
gēn
nǐ
xuéxí
ya!
later
still
more
follow
you
learn
PRT
不错, 不错, 打得真好! 今天没有你, 这场比赛还真的很难说呀! 以后还要多跟你学习呀!
(Well done! Well done! [You] played really well! Without you, we might
hardly win the competition today. I would to like to learn [some
basketball skills] from you.)
4.2.3.Opt-outs
As shown in Figure 4, in both Taiwan and Mainland China, all of the
‘opt-outs’ occurred in performance- or possession-related situations,
seven in performance- (70%) and three in possession-based contexts
(30%). In other words, when compliment topics were associated with
appearance, all the Chinese participants in the present study chose to
offer compliments instead of ‘opt-outs’ whereas this was not the case
in performance- or possession-related situations. This implied that
appearance was perceived as an appropriate topic by both Taiwan and
Mainland Chinese respondents to compliment their peers. The popularity
of appearance compliments among Taiwan Chinese students in the current
study corresponded to Wang and Tsai’s (2003) findings that appearance
was identified as a more preferred topic of compliments for Taiwan
Chinese college students. Furthermore, the common occurrence of
appearance compliments in Taiwan Chinese is further evidence of the
influence of western cultures as it resembles the social norms
relevant to compliments in America (Wang and Tsai, 2003), where the
quality of ‘newness’ is highly valued so that it is socially
acceptable to praise someone seen with something new (Wolfson, 1989).
Wang and Tsai (2003) mentioned that a compliment signals the speaker’s
notice of a change in the addressee who is worthy of attention.
Nevertheless, the evidence in the present study was in contrast to
Ye’s (1995) finding that compliments on performance were preferred by
Mainland Chinese. In Ye’s (1995) study, ‘opt-outs’ were more likely to
occur in appearance- (35.2%) rather than performance-related
situations (12.6%). In the present study, there was no occurrence of
‘opt-outs’ on appearance in Mainland Chinese data. Moreover, as
indicated in section 4.2.1, appearance/possession and
performance/ability were perceived to be equally appropriate for the
Chinese respondents in the current study to perform ‘explicit
compliments’. The evidence above suggested that Mainland Chinese
speakers’ preferences for compliment topics might have shifted after
more than two decades, also possibly affected by western cultures.

Fig. 4. The distribution of ‘opt-outs’ by region and compliment
topics.
The above analyses revealed how the micro-social variable, compliment
topic, interacted with the macro-social factor, region. Chinese
students in Taiwan and Mainland China intended to utilize a variety of
compliment strategies in similar ways across appearance/possession and
performance/ability situations. Put differently, the occurrences of
compliment strategies varied according to the topics of compliments,
regardless of the varieties of Mandarin Chinese. The evidence from the
present study suggested that situational variation was more
influential than the effect of region with regard to the speech act of
compliments.
5.Conclusion
============
The current study contributes to the field of variational pragmatics
by investigating a speech act (compliments), in an under-researched
non-Indo-European language, Chinese. In terms of regional variation,
the study indicated that there were more intra-lingual similarities
than differences between Taiwan and Mainland Chinese compliments. For
example, the student participants in the two regions exhibited clear
preferences for ‘explicit compliments’, in keeping with previous
studies. Furthermore, both groups employed three implicit compliment
strategies more frequently comprising ‘implicit requests’, ‘implicit
assumptions’ and ‘implicit want statements’, though situational
differences were identified in the two varieties of Chinese, with the
first two strategies appearing more in performance situations and the
last in appearance- or possession-related scenarios. With regard to
intra-lingual variations, Mainland Chinese respondents produced
significantly more ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit admiration’
compliments whereas Taiwan Chinese participants offered more ‘implicit
request’ compliments. The findings in the present study lend support
to Barron and Schneider’s (2009) argument that pragmatic variations do
indeed exist between different varieties of the same language.
This study does not attempt to and cannot generalize the findings to
represent Chinese speakers in either Taiwan or Mainland China for two
reasons. First, the participants were sampled from only one area in
each region and thus the data were not fully representative of large
populations. Second, the data were generated from a DCT which elicits
the pragmatic knowledge and perceptions of a cultural group instead of
their actual language performance. Consequently, further research
could focus on Chinese participants from other areas or even other
regions, for instance, Hong Kong and Singapore, by employing a range
of elicitation instruments (for example, role play) in order to gather
speech acts in interaction (Kasper, 2006). In addition, the issue of
individual variability was not addressed in the current study, a
subject for future investigations. It should also be noted that none
of the compliment strategies in the present study were exclusively
employed by either Taiwan Chinese or Mainland Chinese. That is, the
compliment strategies identified were not region-exclusive but
region-preferential, a matter of weighting of one strategy over the
other(s) by a specific group of speakers.
As Schneider and Barron (2008) indicate, the future tasks in
variational pragmatics are to determine which values are preferred in
specific regional varieties of a language and whether other national
or sub-national cultures are equally homogeneous or heterogeneous in
the aspects under investigation. Since the vast majority of Chinese
compliments in the present study were realized in merely four
compliment strategies, there seems to be some evidence that Chinese
compliments appear to be predictable on the strategic level. It is
proposed that compliments are formulaic not merely on the syntactic
and semantic levels across languages but also on the strategic level
but further research in variational pragmatics is needed to explore
this notion. Moreover, in light of previous studies on compliments of
different English varieties, the present investigation indicated that
Chinese compliments may be converging towards western cultures to some
extent. As discussed in section 4.1.3, in comparison with Ye’s (1995)
and Yuan’s (2002) studies, there were higher frequencies in the
present study of ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’
while the frequency of ‘opt-outs’ was remarkably lower in the current
study as compared to previous studies. Possibly influenced by some
westerners’ generosity in offering compliments, Chinese speakers may
be more willing to express their positive intentions either explicitly
or implicitly instead of refraining from showing their admiration.
Moreover, in line with widespread appearance compliments in American
English (Yu, 2005), compliments on appearance have become more popular
in Chinese as evidenced in the present data. It is possible that these
two noteworthy instances may reflect an ongoing change in cultural
values and social norms regarding Chinese compliments. Future studies
might fruitfully explore the extent to which the influence of western
cultures is also evident in other speech acts or at other levels of
analysis.
Appendix A
==========
Written Discourse Completion Task for Taiwanese Students
Situation 1 (Mobile Phone Situation)
A student compliments his/her male classmate on his new mobile phone.
你和同學王正凱已經同班了二年，並有著共同的興趣－彈吉他，因而加入了民謠吉他社。課後，你們常會一起練吉他。現在是午餐時間，正當你們用餐到一半時，他的手機響了，你發現他換了新手機，你喜歡這支的造型和功能，你會對他說：
Situation 2 (Class Presentation Situation)
A student compliments his/her female classmate on her good
presentation.
這學期，你和林欣怡因選修了同一門英文課而認識。有時，你們會在圖書館一起唸書。修此課的學生均須完成一份企劃。現已接近學期末，今天每位同學都要上台作簡報。林欣怡報告時，充滿自信，有不錯的表現，你覺得她的簡報很有趣，也很有條理。下課後，你走向她並對她說：
Situation 3 (Hair Style Situation)
A student compliments his/her male classmate on his new hairstyle.
剛開學第一週，你正要去圖書館還暑假期間借閱的書。在去圖書館的路上，你遇見了同學陳松翰。你們去年曾選修同一門科目。暑假時，你們有時會相約出去或一起看電影。你發現他換了新髮型，覺得此髮型很適合他，你走向他並對他說：
Situation 4 (Handbag Situation)
A student compliments his/her female friend on her new handbag.
今天是你好朋友李佩姍的生日，你們從小學相識至今，一直都有保持聯絡。在生日派對上，你發現她戴了一個新款的包包。你上週末逛街時，就已注意到這款包包。這時，你會對她說：
Situation 5 (Basketball Competition Situation)
A student compliments his/her male classmate on his excellent
performance in a basketball competition.
今天是學校的運動會，下午有場校際籃球比賽。你的同學劉志成將代表你們學校參加比賽。他很有運動細胞，球技很好，是籃球社社長。你們已認識了二年。最近，你也迷上此項運動，和他一起打籃球。你們學校贏得了比賽，賽後，你走向他並對他說：
Situation 6 (Weight Loss Situation)
A student compliments his/her female friend on her weight loss.
某個星期六下午，你在市區逛街時，遇見了中學時期的同學陳嘉綺。以前，你們下課後有時會玩在一起。畢業後，仍偶爾會保持聯絡。因為你們很久沒碰面，你發現她變瘦了，也變得更漂亮了，你走向她並對她說：
Situation 7 (PE Test Situation)
A student compliments his/her male classmate on his success in
physical education (PE) test.
每到學期末，體育課都要做體能測試，你同學張偉哲每次都輕易通過考試。你們都是登山社的成員，假日常會去爬山，知道他的體力很好，是個運動健將。今天的體能測驗，他依然順利通過，這時，你會對他說：
Situation 8 (Talent Show Situation)
A student compliments his/her female junior uni-mate on her good
performance in a talent show.
今天學校舉辦了才藝表演比賽，前三名的參賽者將獲得大奬，因此吸引許多學生報名參加。有一位學妹林玉婷正在台上演奏鋼琴。之前，你曾在校園看過她，也跟她說過數次話。你非常喜歡她的表演，演奏後，你會對她說：
Sample of the situation 1 for Mainland Chinese students
A student compliments his/her male classmate on his new mobile phone.
你和同学王正凯已经同班了两年，并有着共同的兴趣—弹吉他，因而加入了民谣吉他社。课后，你们常会一起练吉他。现在是午饭时间，正当你们用餐到一半时，他的手机响了，你发现他换了新手机，你喜欢这支手机的造型和功能，你会对他说：
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1* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 7799082425.
Email addresses: [email protected] (C. Y. Lin),
[email protected] (H. Woodfield), [email protected] (W.
Ren).
 The major difference between micro-social and macro-social factors
is that the former relates to speaker constellations and might vary
from situation to situation while the latter concerns individual
speakers and remains comparatively stable across different contexts
(Schneider and Barron, 2008; Barron and Schneider, 2009). Thus,
micro-social variation is sometimes called “situational variation”
(Schneider and Barron, 2008:18).
2 The claims in the following sections were applied to the
participants in the current study only. Thus, the terms, Taiwan
Chinese and Mainland Chinese, do not refer to general Chinese speakers
in the respective regions. The results might vary according to other
factors, for instance, age and social status.
3 All Chinese examples in this paper were from the participants in the
present study and represented in their original forms. Thus, some
sentences were written in simplified Chinese if they were given by
Mainland Chinese students and some in traditional Chinese if they were
produced by Taiwanese respondents.
4 Differences between traditional and simplified Chinese were
identified in the lexicon appearing in compliments. For example, the
adjective “牛” (i.e., brilliant) was used by Mainland Chinese
participants only to compliment a person’s performance and the
adjective “正” (i.e., good-looking) was employed by Taiwan Chinese
respondents only to praise a female’s appearance. The lexical
differences between the two varieties of Chinese were beyond the scope
of the present study and may be explored in future research.
5 This claim does not deny the fact that the students in Taiwan and
Mainland China are influenced by other English cultures as well, for
instance, British English, New Zealand English or Canadian English, as
the movies or TV programs of these varieties are easily accessible
through mass media or the Internet. Furthermore, some English classes
are instructed by English-speaking teachers other than Americans.
However, the mainstream remains to be American English in both
regions.
6 The first letter of this abbreviation stands for region, that is, T
for Taiwan Chinese and M for Mainland Chinese. The second letter
refers to the gender, namely, M for male and F for female. The
following number is used to replace their real names.
7 The abbreviations used in the interlinear translation are as
follows, adopted from Wang and Tsai (2003): PRT = clause final
particle, Q = final question marker, PFV = perfective aspect marker,
CL = classifier, ADV = adverb.
28