Abstract

As a media for people to communicate, language not only reflects a nation’s culture connotation, but also embodies the nation’s value orientation, life style and thinking mode. Compliment, which is an active language communication behavior, can shorten the distance between the communicators to establish a close and friendly interpersonal relationship. What’s more, it reflects the culture, value and criterion of a community. Praise act which is a common phenomenon in society exists in every social group and different language cultures. It reflects people’s communication activities at different levels and degrees. Also, it enables people to have a close contact with each other, and consolidates as well as strengthens the solidarity between communicators, from this angle of view, it plays the role of social lubricants. Thus, in cross-cultural communication, compliment is so important that it can promote cross-cultural communication. However, English and Chinese are two different languages, so their compliments have obvious differences. This thesis compares the contents and forms of compliment in Chinese and English, including compliment topic, application and choice of words. Through the contrast, we can get the enlightenment: in order to achieve the effect of cross-cultural communication, we should pay attention to and understand the cultural differences behind the language. The study found that, because of the impact of culture, society and language, there were many differences among using compliments in different countries. Thus, we can achieve the desired communicative effect by understanding the cultural differences between each other and using praise words in communication and realize the positive effect of cross-cultural communication from the side of economic connections, cultural exchanges, and harmonious diplomacy between different counties.

Keywords: compliment in Chinese and English; cultural difference; cross-cultural communication

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1.Introduction-1

2.Literature Review-1

3. Contrastive Study of Compliment in Chinese and English-2

3.1 The content of compliment-2

3.1.1 Different topics-3

3.1.2 Different contexts-4

3.2 The form of compliment-5

3.2.1 Different parts of speech-5

3.2.2 Different sentence pattern-6

3.3 The function of compliment-7

4. The Implications for Cross-cultural Communication-8

5. Conclusion-9

Works Cited-11