In the 1970s, some linguists like Turner(1974) , Wolfsan(1976), pomerantz(1978) started their researches on compliments which mainly pay attention to the contents of the compliments。 Since the 1980s, the study on the compliments turned to the perspectives of the intercultural communication and pragmatics。
In the 1990s, Herbert and Holmes made studies on the view of the gender differences in complimenting。
Compared to the foreign scholars, Chinese scholars’ studies on compliments are rather late, which began in the 1990s。 Doctor Gu Yueguo published an article “politeness, pragmatic and culture” on the Foreign Language Teaching and Research in 1992, which had expound the relationship among politeness, pragmatic and culture。 He proposed four aspects features which Chinese language and culture communication have follow: respectfulness, modesty, attitudinal warmth, and refinement。 Jia Yuxin(1997) analyzed the characteristic of English and Chinese compliments in sentence pattern, content and topic in his book Intercultural communication。Hu Wenzhong(1998) also compared the English and Chinese compliments in his book Comparison of Chinese and English cultural customs。 At the beginning of 21 century, some scholars made a systematic classification of the English and Chinese compliments。
This paper aims to find out some primary rules of English and Chinese compliments and their responses through pragmatic analysis comparison and cross-cultural comparison on the basis of the previous studies to find out some practical communication strategies and finally to guide people’s Verbal communication behavior, avoid the conflict and misunderstand by and promote the success of the cross-cultural communication。
This paper consists of five parts。 Part one is introduction, which mainly introduces the research background, significance and the basic framework of this paper。 Part two comparatively analyzes the differences between English and Chinese compliments and their responses from the perspective of pragmatics。 Part three further analyzes the specific reasons for the differences between English and Chinese compliments and their responses。 Part four tries to explore some effective strategies in cross-cultural communication。 Part five is conclusion, which summarizes the findings of the research, and also points out some limitations in it。
II。 Pragmatic analysis on the differences of English and Chinese compliments and their responses
When we refer to the compliments, we should follow the specific principles in different culture background。 In this part, three principles will be mentioned: The Cooperative Principle by Grice, The Politeness by Leech and the Politeness Principle by Gu Yueguo。
2。1 The Cooperative Principle
This principle is proposed by an Oxford philosopher Herbert Paul Grice in 1968 , which have some principles, and Grice short them into four categories of maxims as follows:(《语言学教程》胡壮麟，2011）
a。Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for current purposes of the exchange); Do not make your contribution more informative than is required。
b。Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true。
c。 Relation: Be relevant。
d。 Manner: Be perspicuous。
According to the Cooperative Principle，we can find that Chinese compliments cannot conform to it at all, there are some examples as follows:
(1) -你做的鱼真好吃。
-这是我妈教我的，她做的才好吃呢！
In this dialogue, the hearer does not accept the speaker’s praise, but transform to his mother, which indicates the violation of the Quality because of the words of responses is contrary to the speaker’s semantic meaning which seems not real。 英汉称赞语及其应答的对比语用分析(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_99131.html