School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemHow do people respond when receiving compliments?: cross-cultural comparisons between Taiwanese, Taiwanese Australian and Australians( 1997)This study is to examine responses to compliments of Taiwanese, Taiwanese Australians and Australians. Three politeness principles: Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theories, Leech’s (1983) and Gu’s (1990) politeness maxims were applied to explain data of three cultural groups. Chapter 1 is introduction. It outlines the general background of complimenting behaviours. The researcher claimed that different cultural values might turn a compliment into a insult. It is important and useful to study responses to compliments of different cultures. Past studies on Chinese compliment responses were conducted either in China or used Chinese from China as subjects. These findings could not be applied to Chinese in Taiwan entirely. The overall purpose of this study has two aspects. Firstly, to examine strategies used by three groups and compare them. Three politeness theories will also be used to discuss them in order to find out which theory was suitable for three groups. Secondly, interpersonal variables such as gender, distance and status will also be discussed. The definitions of politeness, compliments and responses to compliments are given. Chapter 2 is a literature review. First, it briefly outlines four major perspectives in the study of politeness: the social-norm view, the conversational-maxim view by Leech (1983), the face-saving view by Brown & Levinson (1987) and the conversational-contract view. Gu (1990) by adopting the conversational-maxim view, designed a Chinese politeness model which includes four maxims: the self-denigration, the address, the tact and the generosity maxims. Second, studies compliments and compliment responses within one cultural context are presented. Third, cross cultural comparisons on compliment responses are discussed, these included Gao’s (1984), Chen’s (1993) studies on Chinese. However, both studies used Chinese from China as subjects. The findings indicate that most Chinese preferred to reject compliments or used indirect strategies to avoid self-praise in order to show politeness. There are three cases of cross-cultural comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals. The most similar one to the present study is by Valdes & Pino (1981). They studied ethnographic compliment responses among bilingual Mexican American speakers, monolingual English-speaking Americans and monolingual Spanish-speaking Mexicans. Chapter 3 is methodology. This study used two methods to collect data. First, natural observations were used to collect real-life examples of compliment responses, about 1164 examples were collected. Second, discourse completion tasks were designed to elicit compliment responses. The discourse completion tasks were completed by 120 subjects. Each cultural group had 40 subjects, including 20 males and 20 females. Two versions of the questionnaire were designed, one in Chinese and one in English. Both Taiwanese and Taiwanese Australian speakers used the Chinese version while Australians used the English version. The responses were categorized into 20 strategies and three types: accept, reject and indirect. The results of the questionnaire data were analysed by using statistics. Chapter 4 is results. This includes the results of ethnographic and questionnaire data. The ethnographic data showed that both Taiwanese and Taiwanese Australians preferred indirect strategy types, though the favourite strategy might be different while Australians preferred accept strategy type. There were differences in responding to compliments according to the three variables of gender, status and distance. However, some of the differences were not obvious. The questionnaire data showed there were significant cultural differences in responding to compliments. The percentages of strategy types of three groups were similar. The gender effect was not significant but distance and status variables were. Further statistical analysis indicated these were due to the combinational effects of gender x distance and gender x status. For different kinds of compliments, subjects also preferred different kinds of strategies. Chapter 5 is discussion and conclusions. The first part is comparisons between ethnographic and questionnaire data. Both data yield similar findings thought more strategies were elicited from questionnaire data. The second part is comparisons between three groups. The findings indicated that three cultural groups were different. Taiwanese Australians adopted both two cultures and created their own politeness principles. They seemed to use indirect strategies, modest denial rejections (similar to Taiwanese) and accept strategies (similar to Australians). Taiwanese subjects also used accept strategies though not as much as the other cultural groups, the percentage was higher than any of past findings of Chinese samples. By applying three politeness theories, it was found that only Leech’s (1983) conversational maxims were adoptable by three groups. While Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory could not explain the indirect and modest denial strategies used by Taiwanese, Gu’s (1990) Chinese politeness principles also failed to explain commonly used accept strategies by three cultural groups. There were several limitations of this study. First the ethnographic data did not include a wider range. Second, only compliment responses were examined. Further studies should examine compliment-compliment responses pairs. This study concluded with suggestions of future studies of Taiwanese politeness in compliment-complimenting responses pairs. Since most Taiwanese speakers spoke Mandarin and Southern Min (Taiwanese), in order to find insightful details, Southern Min (Taiwanese) should be studied.