A Study of Compliment Responses among Taiwanese Learners and Native English speakers
| Autor: | Chun Mei Chung, 鍾玫君 |
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| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 103 Compliments are one of the most extraordinary components of social life. It creates positive energy and reflects the cultural norms and values of a culture. Compliment behavior as a speech act of daily communication, has been one of the significant areas on which linguists have focused and drawn attention to this linguistic phenomenon in the past two decades (Pomerantz, 1978; Wolfson & Manes, 1981; Wolfson, 1983; Holmes, 1988; Holmes & Brown, 1987; Wierzbickz, 1991; Nelson, 1996; Herbert, 1989,1990 ). Compliments, as speech acts are widely influenced by linguistic and socio-cultural norms and reflect language learner cultural norms and values. Compliments enact various functions that affect speech acts. Second language (L2) learners seem to comprehend the pragmatic rules of a first language into second language use, thus L2 learners are influenced by their first language (L1) pragmatic knowledge. Several studies have shown that different cultures have numerous response patterns, and there are various parameters that may affect the way when people respond to compliments. L2 learners are primarily influenced by their L1 cultural background and learning environment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate compliment responses (CR) by Taiwanese (L2) responses in English (TE) and Chinese (TC) groups and make a comparison with native English speaker (NE) in oral communicative contexts. The purpose of Oral Discourse Completion Tests (ODCT) was used to elicit natural c compliment responses orally when responding to different compliment topics and under two variable factors of social distance and status by Taiwanese L2 learners and native English speakers. The ODCT was designed to mimic the daily situations in order to create authentic communication. The corpus used in this analysis consists of 710 compliments responses. Responses collected from the study participants. The results showed that Taiwanese L2 learners differ from native speakers when responding to compliments. The first, three groups of speakers had high frequency on the personal characteristics topic. Compliments using the possession and achievement categories were the most likely to be accepted by Taiwanese English (TE) speakers. Similarly, compliments using the appearance, achievement and ability topics were more likely to be accepted by native English (NE) speakers. By way of contrast, the Taiwanese Chinese (TC) group showed a lower frequency among topics, except for personal characteristics topic. Second, the findings of Taiwanese speakers’ compliment responses strategies seemed to indicate that TE participants were more likely to accept American English discourse rules in general. Third, three groups of speakers have different and similar ways of expressing a response to compliments by different social status and distance. The majority of social familiarity compliments are paid and received among strangers by the NE and TC group. As for TE participants, the most compliments were paid by acquaintances. The finding also revealed that the majority of compliments were received among people in the higher status demographic by NE speakers. The majority of compliments received most frequency among people in the same status by three groups of speakers. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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