Download pdf
How Compliments and Compliment Responses Differ for American and Chinese People on Instagram
- 1 University of California Irvine
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
This paper reports a qualitative study on complimenting behaviors and response strategies of American English speakers (AES) and Chinese speakers (CS). It explores how the two speech groups differ in their patterns of compliment and response behaviors on Instagram. There are 26 participants who have answered a questionnaire that asks them to rate certain statements and let them give examples of compliments and responses. This paper will discuss the interpretations of the questionnaire and link them to linguistic politeness in virtual contexts and second language learning. Some limitations regarding each step of the research are that the sample size is too small to generalize the result to a greater population and that some questions in the questionnaire were not carefully designed. Future research should take note of the limitations and avoid them as much as possible.
Keywords
social media comment, compliment, compliment response, cross-cultural pragmatics
[1]. Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. (2021). Pragmatics and speech acts. The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA): Pragmatics and Speech Acts. https://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/index.html. Retrieved on August 9, 2023.
[2]. Holmes, J. (1988). Paying Compliments: A Sex-Preferential Politeness Strategy. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 445-465.
[3]. Manes, J. & Wolfson, N. (1981). The compliment formula. In F. Coulmas (Ed.), Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech (pp. 116-132). The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton Publishers.
[4]. Manes, J. (1983). Compliments: A mirror of cultural values. In N. Wolfson and E. Judd (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition (pp. 82-95). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
[5]. Herbert, R. K. (1990). Sex-based differences in compliment behavior. Language in Society, 19, 201-224.
[6]. Placencia, M. E. & Lower, A. (2017) Compliments and compliment responses. Pragmatics of Social Media. Handbooks of Pragmatics (HOPS) 11. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter, pp. 633-660. ISBN 9783110431070.
[7]. Pratama, H. (2019) Linguistic Politeness in Online Communication. Universitas Negeri Semarang.
[8]. Chen, R. (1993). Responding to compliments: A contrastive study of politeness strategies between American English and Chinese speakers. Journal of Pragmatics, 20, 49-75.
[9]. Brown, P & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge Univ. Pr.
[10]. Nelson, G. L., Al-batal, M. & Echols, E. (1996). Arabic and English compliment responses: Potential for pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 17(4), 411-432.
[11]. Herbert, R. K. (1989). The ethnography of English compliments and compliment responses: A contrastive sketch. In W. Olesky (Ed.), Contrastive pragmatics (pp. 3-35). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.
[12]. Sun, N. (2014). Gender-based Differences in Complimenting Behaviour: A Critical Literature Review. The ANU Undergraduate Research Journal, 5: 213-222.
[13]. Onursoy, S. (2018). Using emojis: Self-presentation and different meaning creation approaches. Galatasaray Üniversitesi İleti-ş-Im Dergisi. https://doi.org/10.16878/gsuilet.500954
[14]. Herbert, R. K. & Straight, S. (1989). Compliment Rejection versus Compliment-Avoidance: Listener-based Versus Speaker-based Pragmatic Strategies. Language and Communication, 9 (1), 35-47.
Cite this article
Yang,J. (2024). How Compliments and Compliment Responses Differ for American and Chinese People on Instagram. Communications in Humanities Research,31,160-165.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Interdisciplinary Humanities and Communication Studies
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).