Compliments in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese: The Influence of Region and Compliment Topic

ChihYing Lin*, Helen Woodfield, Wei Ren

Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Helen Wodehouse Building, 35 Berkeley Square, Clifton, BS8 1JA, U.K.

ABSTRACT

Situated in a recently established field of variational pragmatics (Schneider and Barron, 2008), this study investigates one of the under-researched non-Indo-European languages, Chinese, with regard to the influence of macro-social and micro-social factors on compliments. More specifically, the present study focuses on the impact of region, a macro-social variable, and compliment topic, a micro-social factor, on Chinese compliments given by Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese higher education students. Sixty Taiwanese and sixty Mainland Chinese, equally gendered in each group, completed a written discourse completion task consisting of eight content-enriched situations (Billmyer and Varghese, 2000) eliciting compliments. In terms of regional effect, commonalities emerged between those compliments of Chinese students in Taiwan and Mainland China. Both groups preferred to offer ‘explicit compliments’, ‘implicit requests’, ‘implicit assumptions’, and ‘implicit want statements’ as compliments, with ‘explicit compliments’ emerging as the most popular strategy. On the other hand, statistically significant differences were identified between the two groups ina few implicit compliment strategies. Furthermore, both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese students utilized several compliment strategies in similar ways across appearance/possession and performance/ability situations.It appears that in most cases, it was compliment topic rather than the variety ofChinese which modulated the compliments by both groups. In addition, the paper suggests that compliments in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese may have been undergoing a change, possibly influenced by western cultures.

Keywords: Chinese compliments, Regional effect, Compliment topic

1.Introduction

In cross-cultural or intercultural pragmatics research, the focus in recent years has been predominantly on the pragmatic variations between or across different languages under the influences of micro-social factors (i.e., social dominance, social distance and degree of imposition). Relatively little attention has been paid to the effect of macro-social factors[1], such as, region, gender, ethnicity, age and social class, on different varieties of a language, either at the national or the sub-national level (Barron and Schneider, 2009). Research in dialectology has investigated the systematic impact of social factors on the phonological, grammatical and lexical levels between different dialects (see Wolfram and Schilling-Estes, 1998, with respect to varieties of English). Nevertheless, few studies in either pragmatics or dialectology have thus far explored the influences of macro-social factors on intra-lingual variations at the pragmatic level. In light of this research gap, Schneider and Barron (2008) have established a new sub-field of pragmatics, variational pragmatics (henceforth VP), which is thus situated at the interface of pragmatics with dialectology. This new sub-discipline aims to explore the effect of macro-social factors on intra-lingual pragmatic conventions. As Barron and Schneider (2009:425) indicate, “pragmatic similarities may occur across languages, while pragmatic differences may occur across varieties of the same language”.

Of the existing variational pragmatics research, discussions have essentially drawn on the varieties of Indo-European languages, for example, English (Holmes and Brown, 1987; Creese, 1991;Breuer and Geluykens, 2007;Barron, 2008), Spanish (Márquez-Reiter, 2003; Placencia, 2008;Félix-Brasdefer, 2009, 2010b), German (Muhr, 2008; Warga, 2008), French (Schölmberger, 2008), and Dutch (Plevoets et al., 2008). Even in Schneider and Barron’srecently published(2008) edition of variational pragmatics, none of the papers dealt with the national or sub-national varieties of non-Indo-European languages, for instance, Chinese and Japanese.To our knowledge, there have been two studies thus far involving Chinese speakers with the focus on pragmatic variations. Bresnahan et al. (1999)investigated how Chinese native speakers in Singapore and Taiwan responded to a friend’s requests at different levels of imposition. Spencer-Oatey et al. (2008) conducted a study on the evaluation of compliment response strategies by university students in Britain, Mainland China and Hong Kong. Intra-lingual variations in Chinese were identified between Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong respondents in the judgements of disagreement responses.

Responding to the call for more variational pragmatics research, especially on non-Indo-European languages, this study examines the effect of both macro-social and micro-social factors on compliment giving in two varieties of Chinese. More specifically, the study has two objectives: first, to investigate regional differences in compliments given by Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese college/university students, that is, the impact of region (macro-social factor) on Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese compliments. Second, the paper aims to explore the extent to which such compliments vary according to the interplay of the region variable with a micro-social factor, the topic of compliments.

As compliments may reflect societal values, the issue of what counts as an acceptable topic varies from culture to culture. Several general topic categories have been identified across languages (Wolfson, 1983, 1989;Knapp et al., 1984;Daikuhara, 1986; Holmes, 1986, 1988, 1995; Wang and Tsai, 2003; Yu, 2005): these have involved appearance/possession, performance/ability and personality traits, with the first two categories occurring most in the above mentioned studies. The topics of compliments seem to be commonly shared across different cultures; however, each culture has its preferences for, or acceptance of, certain topic categories and specific attributes within the categories. For example, possession compliments in American English included those relating to children and spouses (Wolfson, 1983; Knapp et al., 1984). Nevertheless, such compliments were regarded as inappropriate in New Zealand English (Holmes and Brown, 1987). Holmes and Brown (1987) indicated that in New Zealand, it was unacceptable to compliment a man on his wife in that this reflected a view of his wife as a possession. This example reveals cross-cultural differences in the perceptions of appropriate compliment topics. The present study thus takes a dual focus, namely, the influence of (a) region and (b) compliment topic on Chinese compliments. A written discourse completion task (henceforth DCT)was employed to investigate Taiwan and Mainland Chinese students’ perceptions of appropriate complimenting behavior, aiming to address the following two research questions:

(1)To what extent does the overall preference for compliment strategies by Taiwan Chinese differ from that by Mainland Chinese?

(2)With regard to situational variations, when giving compliments in appearance/possession and performance/ability situations, to what extent do compliment strategies by Taiwan Chinese differ from those by Mainland Chinese?

This paper starts with an overview of empirical studies which investigate Chinese compliments. Next, the methodological issues are addressed with regard to variational pragmatics in general and the present studyin particular, including the participants, the instrument, coding scheme and data analysis. The results are discussed in relation to implications for compliments in Taiwan and Mainland Chineseon the basis of changes observed in appropriate complimenting performance. The final section concludes with a summary of findings and suggestions for future research.

2.Compliments

Holmes (1988:446)observes that “a compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some ‘good’ (possession, characteristic, skill etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer”. Following this definition, compliments serve as a positive politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson, 1987) to satisfy the hearer’s positive face wants. However, compliment receivers might sometimes experience compliments as negative or face-threatening. In some cultures like Samoan (Holmes, 1986, 1988) and Chinese (Ye, 1995; Wang and Tsai, 2003; Yu, 2005), compliments might imply for the hearer an element of envy or desire of the complimented object and might, therefore, be interpreted as an indirect request that violates the hearer’s face. An in-depth study of a speech act, like compliments, not only reveals the rules of speaking in a speech community but also offers insights into the value system of an individual and the community (Wolfson, 1981, 1989). Compared with a number of compliment studies in different varieties of English and other western languages (Manes and Wolfson, 1981; Knapp et al., 1984;Wolfson, 1984, 1989; Holmes, 1988, 1995; Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989;Herbert, 1989, 1990; Parisi and Wogan, 2006), Chinese compliments have received relatively little attention in the literature.The four major studies comprise Ye’s (1995), Yuan’s (2002), Wang and Tsai’s (2003) and Yu’s (2005) research, with the first two studies focusing on Mainland Chinese, the third one on Taiwan Chinese and the last study comparing Taiwan Chinese with American English compliments.

2.1.Previous research on Mainland Chinese compliments

Ye (1995) investigated the effects of topic and gender on compliments and compliment responses in Mainland Chinese. In this study, compliments were further explored in terms of strategies, semantic items, compliment focus and functions. A DCT composed of 16 situations was conducted with 96 Mainland Chinese. The findings indicated that Chinese native speakers in Mainland China preferred to give ‘explicit compliments’. Furthermore, more ‘explicit compliments’ and fewer non-complimentary remarks were evident in performance-related situations compared with appearance contexts. It was concluded that compliments for performance were preferred and more acceptable by Mainland Chinese. Moreover, Ye (1995) suggested that compliments might create rather than reduce the distance between the interlocutors. This assumption contradicts the function of compliments in English varieties (Wolfson, 1983;Holmes, 1988), namely, to consolidate or increase solidaritybetween the speaker and the hearer, but lends support to Daikuhara’s (1986) investigation of Japanese compliments in which it was observed that compliments sometimes signify deference and thus create social distance while at the same time maintaining solidarity.

Yuan (2002) employed multiple methods to explore compliments and compliment responses in Kunming Chinese, a dialect spoken in Kunming, Mainland China. Oral and written DCTs, designed based on natural observation data, were administered to 175 informants of three age groups, three education levels and two gender groups to provide a complete picture of compliments as a speech event in Kunming Chinese. Interviews were conducted with some respondents who accomplished an oral DCT to elicit their perceptions and intentions of compliments. Similar to Ye’s (1995) finding, Kunming speakers tended to pay ‘explicit compliments’ in the majority of the situations in both DCT and observation data. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that some cases of opt-outs and non-complimentary remarks were identified in both Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) DCT data. Although the DCT might not reflect language use in natural settings (Yuan, 2002; Golato, 2003; Woodfield, 2008;Jucker, 2009), the occurrence of opt-outs indicated that some Chinese speakers might choose not to express their positive intentions in some situations where a compliment is expected.

2.2.Previous research on Taiwan Chinese compliments

Wang and Tsai (2003) investigated compliments and compliment responses by Taiwanese college students, adopting ethnographic observation (Manes and Wolfson, 1981). In particular, they examined the syntactic and semantic structures of compliments, compliment topics and compliment responses in relation to the gender of the speaker and the hearer. A total of 454 natural compliments and compliment responses were recorded. The results showed that appearance was the most common topic in either cross-gender or same-gender interactions except that females were more likely to compliment men on their performance/ability instead of their appearance. The popularity of appearance compliments among Taiwan college students was contradictory to Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies on Mainland Chinese speakers in which performance was a preferred topic of compliments. Appearance and ability compliments accounted for 22.7% and 25.4% of the compliments respectively based on the observation data in Yuan’s (2002) research and 45.2% and 28.2% of the compliments respectively in Wang and Tsai’s (2003) study. Compliments on appearance were much less common in Mainland Chinese than Taiwan Chinese whereas performance compliments were equally frequent in these two Chinese varieties. In addition, based on compliments and compliment responses by Taiwanese students, Wang and Tsai (2003) suggested that Chinese compliments normally have a positive effect on interpersonal relations, for instance, to reinforce solidarity, to maintain rapport, or to attend to the addressee’s positive face wants. This is in sharp contrast to Ye’s (1995) conclusion which suggested that such speech acts create a distance between people of close relationship.

Yu (2005) also employed ethnographic observation to investigate Taiwan Chinese and American English speakers’ compliments by analyzing the distribution of compliments, their functions, compliment topics and addresser-addressee relationship as well as the issue of cultural universality versus specificity. A total of 410 compliment exchanges were produced by 356 Taiwan Chinese participants and 789 compliment exchanges by 636 Americans. All of the compliments in Yu’s (2005) study occurred in ordinary conversations between people of various occupations, ages, statuses and relationships while the compliment data in Wang and Tsai’s (2003) study mostly appeared between undergraduates or graduates and their peers, namely, the student community. In Yu’s (2005) research, Taiwan Chinese speakers were observed to offer significantly fewer compliments than their American counterparts. Direct compliments were the most frequent strategy for the two groups of speakers while Taiwan Chinese produced indirect compliments proportionally more than Americans. Compared with Wang and Tsai’s (2003) evidence described above, there were differences in compliment functions and topics in Taiwan Chinese compliments. First, in Yu’s (2005) study, Taiwan Chinese tended to compliment on performance/ability while appearance compliments were more popular in Wang and Tsai’s (2003) data. Second, Yu (2005) stated that in Chinese culture, compliments were mainly employed as assertions of admiration whereas Wang and Tsai (2003) suggested that Taiwan Chinese students offered compliments to establish solidarity or rapport.

In brief, these four studies on Mainland, Kunming and Taiwan Chinese compliments demonstrate intra-lingual variations in several respects with regard to compliment strategies, topics of compliments and functions of compliments. The findings lend support to Barron and Schneider’s (2009) claim that pragmatic variations do indeed exist between varieties of the same language. Furthermore,there is some evidence to suggest that speakers of the same language variety do not necessarily utilize the language variety in the same way.

3.Method

With respect to the methodology underlying variational pragmatics, three principles were addressed by Barron and Schneider (2009). The first principle is the contrastivity principle, defined as follows: “linguistic features can be considered variety-specific only if the variety under study is contrasted with at least one other variety of the same kind and of the same language” (Barron and Schneider, 2009:429). In other words, at least two varieties of a language have to be contrasted in order to establish which features or values are preferred in one specific variety. Second, it is essential that studies are conducted empirically instead of relying on researchers’ or others’ intuitions or recalled experiences. The types of such empirical data may consist of both elicited and naturally occurring conversations, with each having its own advantages and limitations (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 2005). Again, the choice of methods should shed light on the issues under investigation (Félix-Brasdefer, 2010a). As the aim of variational pragmatics is to study the impact of macro-social factors on language in interaction, those experimental methods are favored which allow a certain control of variables. Although the conception of social factors as stable might be criticized by reductionism, the experimental design ensures replicability and comparability between studies in the early stage of variational pragmatics. Barron and Schneider (2009) suggest that the more systematically the variables are controlled, the more different varieties can be contrasted and variety-exclusive features can be identified. In this sense, comparability is the third methodological principle. In short, the three methodological rules of thumb in variational pragmatics are that two or more varieties of a language are contrasted (contrastive) by collecting empirical data (empirical) in experimental (comparable) research designs. In the present study, a written discourse completion task was designed to elicit empirical and comparable data from two contrastive varieties of Mandarin Chinese, namely, Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese.The profile of the participants and the nature of the elicitation instrument are discussed respectively in detail in the following sections 3.1 and 3.2.

3.1.Participants

Two groups of participants took part in the present study: 60 Taiwan Chinese and 60 Mainland Chinese[2], to follow the contrastivity principle noted earlier. That is, two varieties ofMandarin Chinese were the focus of the study, Taiwan and Mainland Chinese. The former was elicited from students at a college in the central part of Taiwan and the latter from learners at a university in the Shandong province in Mainland China. In other words, there were a total of 120 Chinese-speaking college/university students, aged between 19 and 23 years with an average age of 21.4 years. Furthermore, all learners were sampled from a pool of non-English majors to exclude the possible influence of another language/culture on compliment production. Mandarin Chinese served as the native language for both groups of the respondents. Moreover, there were an equal number of male and female participants in each group. According to the above description of the participants, such variables as educational level, field of study, and gender were controlled to ensure the homogeneity of the participants. In other words, the respondents in the present study were equally gendered and they were all non-English-major students from the same level of educational background (e.g., college or university).

3.2.Instrument

The compliments from Taiwan and Mainland Chinese participants were elicited from a written discourse completion task. This instrument has been commonly employed in cross-cultural or intercultural pragmatics research but also widely discussed and criticized. Due to its non-interactive and inconsequential nature (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 2005), the DCT cannot examine conversational features typical in spoken discourse, for instance, turn-taking, negotiations between interlocutors, and paralinguistic or non-verbal resources (Yuan, 2001; Kasper, 2008; Woodfield, 2008). More importantly, its decontexualized design (Kasper, 2008) does not yield actual language use in face-to-face communication but participants’ beliefs about pragmatic appropriacy (Yuan, 2002; Golato, 2003; Jucker, 2009). In spite of its limitations, the DCT provides large samples of highly controlled data in a short period of time (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 2005). Furthermore, its replicability allows a comparison of speech act(s) across various languages or varieties of a language. The advantages of the DCT are in keeping with two of the methodological principles proposed by Barron and Schneider (2009), namely, the employment of empirical and comparable data. Consequently, the DCT serves as an appropriate methodological tool in the present study as it focuses on participant perceptions of appropriate production, allows for control of variables, and offers initial insights into how compliments were realized in different varieties of Chinese, a topic currently under-researched in variational pragmatics.