This paper is through contrastive analysis, comparing compliments of English and Chinese in language forms, topic distributions, response strategies and pragmatic principles, and it also gives some strategies to English learners to avoid pragmatic failures in using English compliments and improve their communication competence in cross-cultural communication.

     2. Literature Review源'自:优尔`~论`文'网www.youerw.com

As a kind of speech act frequently used, compliment has caused wide concern and research from scholars. Since the publication of Compliment Responses by Pomerantz in 1978, many linguists such as Manes, Wolfson, Herbert and Holmes have studied compliment and compliment responses. With the development of linguistics in China, domestic study on compliments and compliment responses has become more and more important in recent years. 

     In 1992, Gu Yueguo published an article Politeness, Pragmatics and Culture in the Foreign Language Teaching and Research, describing the relationship between politeness, pragmatics and culture. In 1997, Jia Yuxin published Intercultural Communication, in which through questionnaire survey and from the aspects of syntactic structure and semantic composition, English and Chinese compliments are analyzed contrastively. In 2000, in the Compliments in Cross-cultural Studies published in the Journal of Sichuan International Studies University, Duan Chenggang made a quantitative study on the written compliment architecture through experimental method of corpus collection section.