Regional Influence on Compliments: Pragmatic …



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

Chih Ying 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 in a 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 of Chinese 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

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’s recently 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 study in 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 Chinese on the basis of changes observed in appropriate complimenting performance. The final section concludes with a summary of findings and suggestions for future research.

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.

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 solidarity between 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 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.

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.

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 of Mandarin 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).

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.

The present study formed part of a larger research project which investigated a combination of three speech acts including compliments, refusals and requests in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese. There were 20 situations in total consisting of 8 compliments, 8 refusals and 4 requests. It was thought that the inclusion of three speech acts could prevent the respondents from assuming that all situations were associated with a specific speech act, thus producing invalid responses. Moreover, the number of situations in the current study was at a mid-point between the 16 items in Ye’s (1995) DCT and the 24 items in Yuan’s (2002) DCT. In other words, the 20 situations in the present DCT were comparable to the DCTs in Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies.

The DCT in the current study was an open written questionnaire without a dialogue (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 1993) or a rejoinder (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Rose, 1992; Johnston et al., 1998). The participants read situational descriptions and provided written responses. According to Billmyer and Varghese (2000), content-enriched DCTs elicit more elaboration which is more likely to be identified in authentic data than content-poor prompts. Accordingly, each situation contained the following information: the name and gender of the interlocutor, the relationship with the interlocutor, the length of acquaintanceship, the frequency of interaction, and the setting. Furthermore, compliment situations were based on two major topics, appearance/possession and performance/ability, in line with previous studies (Yuan, 2002; Wang and Tsai, 2003). Following Knapp et al.’s (1984) definitions, appearance/possession-related compliments are associated with the addressee’s physical attributes and features and items of ownership. On the other hand, performance/ability compliments are those which signal the approval of someone’s skills or abilities, for example, academic or work performance (Knapp et al., 1984). Under each topic, two situations were created in which compliments would be directed towards interlocutors of the same and opposite gender respectively. Hence, there were a total of eight situations (see Appendix A for the version for Taiwanese students). Table 1 provides a synopsis of the compliment scenarios. Compliment topics and the gender of the addressee were the two independent variables in the design of the DCT. This paper focuses on the impact of compliment topic on compliment strategies in Chinese.

Table 1

Descriptions of compliment situations.

|Compliment situation |Compliment topic |Gender of the addressee |

|1. Mobile phone |appearance/possession |male |

|2. Class presentation |performance/ability |female |

|3. Hairstyle |appearance/possession |male |

|4. Handbag |appearance/possession |female |

|5. Basketball competition |performance/ability |male |

|6. Weight loss |appearance/possession |female |

|7. PE test |performance/ability |male |

|8. Talent show |performance/ability |female |

As the respondents of the present study were all students, the situations were designed to reflect student life. Though the participants might not have the same or similar experiences described in the situations, they did not have to place themselves in a different social role, for instance, a professor or an employer. Bonikowska (1988) states that it is problematic to require respondents to adopt a role with which they are not familiar and base any conclusions on their linguistic performance. In this regard, all informants were required to maintain their original role of a student. Furthermore, Chinese compliments tend to occur between people of equal status (Wang and Tsai, 2003; Yu, 2005) and between casual friends (Yu, 2005). Therefore, the situations were controlled for two variables: social dominance and social distance. Participants (S) were considered to be social equals with their (hypothetical) interlocutor (H) as both were students and casual friends: thus both social dominance and social distance were configured as S=H across the eight situations.

There were two versions of the DCT as Taiwan and Mainland Chinese used different forms of the characters in Chinese. One version was written in traditional Chinese for Taiwanese students and the other in simplified Chinese for students in Mainland China. A sample situation from the Mainland Chinese version is provided at the end of Appendix A. Each version was checked by two researchers from the corresponding regions and also cross-checked by a person from the other region to ensure the agreement between the two versions. The DCT was then modified according to their feedback and piloted before the current study was implemented.

3 Coding scheme

The responses from the DCT data were classified into three main categories, ‘explicit compliments’, ‘implicit compliments’ and ‘opt-outs’. Explicit compliments are generally direct and unambiguous positive remarks that contain at least one positive semantic carrier (Ye, 1995; Yuan, 2002; Yu, 2005). On the other hand, implicit compliments, without a positive lexical item at the level of linguistic form (Ye, 1995; Yu, 2005), require more inferences from the addressee to reconstruct the implicated meaning (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989; Yu, 2005). For example, a male speaker compliments a female friend’s handbag by saying, “Nǐ de bāobāo hǎo piàoliàng ā! Wǒ yě xiǎng gěi wǒ nǚpéngyǒu mǎi gè le” 你的包包好漂亮啊! 我也想給我女朋友买个了[3] (Your handbag is so pretty! I would like to buy one for my girlfriend). The first sentence “Nǐ de bāobāo hǎo piàoliàng ā!” 你的包包好漂亮啊 (Your handbag is so pretty) is coded as an ‘explicit compliment’ because of the positive adjective “piàoliàng” 漂亮 (pretty). The second utterance “Wǒ yě xiǎng gěi wǒ nǚpéngyǒu mǎi gè le” 我也想給我女朋友买个了(I would like to buy one for my girlfriend), while not including any positive lexical items, carries complimentary force in that people normally buy things that are good (Yuan, 2002) and the male speaker of this utterance likes the handbag and might intend to please his girlfriend by sending her the handbag as a gift. Hence, the sentence “Wǒ yě xiǎng gěi wǒ nǚpéngyǒu mǎi gè le” 我也想給我女朋友买个了 (I would like to buy one for my girlfriend) is categorized as an ‘implicit compliment’ on the handbag. Following Yuan’s (2002) coding scheme, both ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’ were head acts in the present study. That is, ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit compliments’ could appear alone, independently from each other. ‘Implicit compliments’ did not replace ‘explicit compliments’ nor become supporting moves when they co-occurred with ‘explicit compliments’. Based on the current data, ‘implicit compliments’ were further categorized into eight types. Three categories were adapted from Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s (1989) and Yuan’s (2002) studies. They consisted of ‘implicit contrast’, ‘implicit explanation’ and ‘implicit request’ compliments. The remaining five strategies emerged from the present data and were composed of ‘implicit admiration’, ‘implicit assumption’, ‘implicit evaluation’, ‘implicit joke’ and ‘implicit want statement’ compliments. That is, these eight compliment strategies were generated both inductively and deductively. The definition of each implicit compliment strategy is provided in Table 2 with the examples in italics.

A few respondents chose to say nothing; in this case, their responses were coded as ‘opt-outs’. Replies other than compliments, for instance, greetings, address terms, or non-complimentary remarks, were excluded in the data analysis. For example, in the Mobile Phone situation, one student replied by saying, “Zhè shǒujī shì xīn de ma? Hǎo piàoliàng ā!” 这手机是新的吗? 好漂亮啊 (Is this a new mobile phone? [It looks] very nice). The first sentence “Zhè shǒujī shì xīn de ma?” 这手机是新的吗? (Is this a new mobile phone?) signals a notice of a new item from the addressee but does not have any complimentary meaning; hence, it was not included for data analysis but the second utterance “Hǎo piàoliàng ā!” 好漂亮啊 ([It looks] very nice) was coded as ‘explicit compliment’. An equal number of DCT completed by male and female participants were selected randomly from the two regions and independently coded by another researcher who was initially given the definitions and examples of all compliment strategies. When there were differences in coding, the two raters discussed and reached an agreement. The Kappa statistic was performed to determine the consistency between the two raters. The inter-rater reliability was found to be K = 0.92 (p < 0.001).

Table 2

The categories of implicit compliment strategies.

|Type |Definition & example |

|Admiration |to show the speaker’s admiration by setting the addressee as a learning target, e.g., “Wā! Jīntiān nǐ de |

| |qǐhuà bàogào de bú cuò. Rúguǒ kěyǐ, xiǎng gēn nǐ xuéxí yīxià.” 哇! 今天你的企劃報告得不錯. 如果可以, |

| |想跟你學習一下 (Wow! You did a good presentation today. If possible, I’d like to learn how to do it |

| |[presentation skill] from you.) |

|Assumption |the speaker’s assumption regarding the addressee’s past effort to produce good performance, e.g., “Wā! |

| |Wǒ juéde nǐ de jiǎnbào hěn bàng ye! Nǐ yīdìng huā hěnduō shíjiān zài zhǔnbèi ba!”哇! 我覺得你的簡報很棒耶! |

| |你一定花很多時間在準備吧! (Wow! I think your presentation was very good. You must have spent a lot of time |

| |preparing for it.) |

| |the speaker’s assumption regarding the future good outcome based on the addressee’s performance, e.g., |

| |“Yùtíng, tài bàng le. Kàn lái dìyīmíng fēi nǐ mò shǔ a!” 玉婷, 太棒了. 看来第一名非你莫属啊! (Yuting, |

| |brilliant! You will definitely get the first prize.) (in the Talent Show situation) |

|Contrast | the contrast between the addressee and others, e.g., “Biérén pīn le mìng pǎo cái miǎnqiǎng tōngguò, Kàn nǐ|

| |bù fèi lìqì jiù dǎ le mǎn fēn.” 别人拼了命跑才勉强通过, 看你不费力气就打了满分 (Others ran so hard to |

| |barely pass the test. You got a full mark without much effort.) |

| |the contrast between the speaker and the addressee, e.g., “Nǐ tán de zhēn bàng, wǒ yě tǐng xǐhuān  gāngqín |

| |de, kě  jiù shì méi tiānfèn, bù huì tán.” 你弹得真棒, 我也挺喜欢钢琴的, 可就是没天分, 不会弹 (You played |

| |the piano so well. I like playing the piano as well, but I don’t have that talent. I can’t do it.) |

|Evaluation |to give a complimentary evaluation to assure the addressee’s past effort, e.g., “Nǐ gāngcái de |

| |biǎoyǎn shízài shì tài yōuxiù le, xīnkǔ de liànxí zǒngsuàn shì yǒu dàijià de.” 你剛才的表演實在是太優秀了, |

| |辛苦的練習總算是有代價的 (Your performance was really awesome. All the hard work paid off.) |

|Explanation |to describe the good aspects of the addressee’s appearance/performance, e.g., “Nǐ de bàogào zuò de hěn |

| |hǎo ye! Shàngtái yě dōu bù huì jǐnzhāng, kěyǐ jiāo wǒ rúhé zuò ma?” 你的報告做得很好耶! 上台也都不會緊張, |

| |可以教我如何做嗎? (Your presentation was very good. You were not nervous at all. Could you teach me how to |

| |make a presentation?) |

|Joke |to express the speaker’s positive intentions in a jokey way, e.g., “Wā! Nǐ biàn hǎo zhèng yo! |

| |Dà zhèng miē ya! Xiànzài yǒu hěnduō nánshēng zhuī nǐ hou!” 哇! 妳變好正唷! 大正[4]咩呀! 現在有很多男生追妳 |

| |吼! (Wow! You look so beautiful. [You are] a pretty girl. There must be a lot of men who have a crush on |

| |you.) |

|Request |to ask the addressee for his/her opinion, advice or experience, or to request the addressee to do |

| |something, for instance, to teach the speaker some skills, e.g., “Nǐ de bàogào zuò de hěn hǎo ye! Shàng tái|

| |yě dōu bù huì jǐnzhāng, kěyǐ jiāo wǒ rúhé zuò ma?”你的報告做得很好耶! 上台也都不會緊張, 可以教我如何做嗎? |

| |(Your presentation was very good. You were not nervous at all. Could you teach me how to make a |

| |presentation?) |

|Want statement |to show the speaker’s want, wish or interest in the complimented topic, e.g., “Nǐ  zhè gè bāobāo zhēn |

| |piàoliàng, wǒ yě xiǎng mǎi yī gè” 你这个包包真漂亮, 我也想买一个 (Your handbag is really pretty. I would |

| |like to buy one as well.) |

4 Data analysis

The compliment data were analyzed by both descriptive and inferential statistics. Frequencies and percentages were used to identify the most and least popular strategies by Taiwan and Mainland Chinese (region variable) and to investigate similarities and differences in the distribution of compliment strategies by the two groups in appearance/possession and performance/ability situations (the interaction between the region variable and the factor of compliment topic). The frequency of each compliment strategy was calculated based on its individual occurrences in the data. Using the example of ‘implicit admiration’ compliments in Table 2 (i.e., You did a good presentation today. If possible, I’d like to learn how to do it [presentation skill] from you), there was one ‘explicit compliment’ (the first utterance) and one ‘implicit admiration’ compliment (the second utterance). Regarding inferential statistics, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (the K-S test) and Levene’s test were first computed to analyze the normality of the data and homogeneity of variance respectively, two significant assumptions of a parametric test. The statistics showed that these two assumptions were not met. In other words, a non-parametric test is a preferred choice to yield appropriate test results. To test differences between two independent groups, Mann-Whitney U test, “the non-parametric equivalent of the independent T-test” (Field, 2009:540), was carried out to examine if the differences in compliment strategies were significant between Taiwan and Mainland Chinese (regional difference) with the probability value set at p < 0.05.

Results and discussion

1 Regional differences in compliment strategies

Table 3 presents the frequency and percentage of each compliment strategy by the two groups of Chinese speakers. Based on the DCT data, a total of 120 Chinese participants produced 1083 compliments across the eight situations (516 compliments by Taiwan Chinese and 567 compliments by Mainland Chinese). There were 10 ‘opt-out’ responses, 5 in each group. Put differently, every respondent gave an average of 1.1 compliments in each scenario.

Table 3

Frequencies and percentages of compliment strategies by region.

| Compliment strategies |Region |

| |Taiwan |Rank |Mainland China |Rank |

|Explicit compliments |380 (72.9%) |1 |464 (81.1%) |1 |

|Implicit compliments |136 (26.1%) | |103 (18.0%) | |

|Admiration |1 (0.2%) |10 |10 (2.7%) |5 |

|Assumption |30 (5.8%) |3 |21 (3.7%) |3 |

|Contrast |13 (2.5%) |5 |13 (2.3%) |6 |

|Evaluation |2 (0.4%) |8 |0 (0%) |10 |

|Explanation |2 (0.4%) |8 |7 (1.2%) |7 |

|Joke |6 (1.2%) |6 |6 (1.0%) |8 |

|Request |52 (10.0%) |2 |30 (5.2%) |2 |

|Want statement |30 (5.8%) |3 |16 (2.8%) |4 |

|Sub-total |516 (99.0%) | |567 (99.1%) | |

|Opt-outs |5 (1.0%) |7 |5 (0.9%) |9 |

|Total |521 (100%) | |572 (100%) | |

1 Explicit compliments

The results indicated that both groups of the respondents preferred explicitness in their compliment-giving behavior. ‘Explicit compliments’ were the most popular strategy by Taiwan and Mainland Chinese across the situations, with Mainland Chinese significantly more explicit than Taiwanese participants (U = 1073.50, z = -3.87, p < .001). The ‘explicit compliments’ (81.1%) by Mainland informants were more than four times as frequent as their ‘implicit compliments’ (18%). Taiwan Chinese tended to pay compliments explicitly as well but with more frequent use of implicit strategies. The ‘explicit compliments’ (72.9%) by Taiwan Chinese were 2.5 times more frequent than their ‘implicit compliments’ (26.1%). In keeping with previous studies, Chinese speakers were explicit in expressing their positive intentions (Ye, 1995; Yuan, 2002; Yu, 2005), in similar ways to American English speakers in Yu’s (2005) study.

2 Implicit compliments

With respect to implicit compliments, three strategies occurred frequently in both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese compliment data. These strategies included ‘implicit requests’, ‘implicit assumptions’, and ‘implicit want statements’ and accounted for 82.4% and 65% of Taiwan and Mainland Chinese implicit compliments respectively. Clearly, these three types of implicit compliments were more widely employed by respondents from Taiwan. The other implicit strategies were relatively less common in Chinese compliments, especially Taiwan Chinese. For example, there were only two instances of ‘implicit evaluation’ and ‘implicit explanation’ compliments each in the Taiwanese corpus. These two strategies also occurred infrequently in the Mainland Chinese data.

One interesting difference between the Taiwan and Mainland data lies in the unequal distribution of the strategy of ‘implicit admiration’. Table 3 shows that all of the ‘implicit admiration’ compliments were produced by Mainland Chinese students except one by a Taiwan Chinese. Based on Mann-Whitney U test, the significant differences were observed only in ‘implicit requests’ (U = 1387.00, z = -2.39, p < .05) and ‘implicit admirations’ (U = 1559.50, z = -2.64, p < .05) between Taiwan and Mainland Chinese.

Compliments in various languages have been recognized as a very routinized speech act as it is normally performed in a limited number of syntactic and semantic patterns (Manes and Wolfson, 1981; Wolfson, 1984, 1989; Daikuhara, 1986; Holmes, 1986; Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989). The empirical evidence in the present study suggested that the compliments by the two regional groups tended to be formulaic in nature. That is, approximately 93% of Chinese compliments were realized in either ‘explicit compliments’ or one of the three popular implicit strategies mentioned above. These four strategies accounted for 94.4% and 92.8% of compliments by Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese respectively. This finding is indicative of the formulaic nature of Chinese compliment strategies, with ‘explicit compliments’ as the most preferred strategy.

3 Opt-outs

Ten cases of the ‘opt-out’ strategy were equally distributed (around 1%) in both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese responses. Thus, the difference between the two regions was not statistically significant (U = 1800.00, z = -.00, ns). Compared with Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies, a higher percentage of ‘opt-outs’ was identified in their DCT data, that is, 27.6% in Ye’s and 2.6% in Yuan’s studies. A comparison of previous research with the current study is provided in Table 4 with respect to the three major compliment strategies: ‘explicit compliments’, ‘implicit compliments’ and ‘opt-outs’. The compliments in these three studies were all gathered through DCTs composed of appearance/possession and performance/ability situations eliciting compliments to both male and female interlocutors. In other words, the DCTs in the three studies were designed based on the same independent variables: compliment topic and the gender of compliment receiver. Moreover, the compliment situations in the three DCTs were established to occur between interactants who were both (i) acquaintances and (ii) of equal status. Though situational descriptions in the DCTs were not completely the same, their similar designs allow a comparison between the three studies on Chinese compliments.

Table 4

A comparison of previous relevant research with the present study.

| |Ye (1995) |Yuan (2002) |The present study |

|Explicit compliments |65.4% |62% |77.2% |

|Implicit compliments |7% |4.3% |21.9% |

|Opt-outs |27.6% |2.6%a |0.9% |

a The percentage in Yuan’s (2002) study did not total 100% as the data comprised not merely explicit and implicit compliments but also compliments that served as adjuncts or supporting moves. The latter compliments were not included in the coding scheme of the present study and thus their percentage was not provided in Table 4.

Based on the results from a limited number of empirical studies, there is emerging evidence that Chinese speakers’ complimenting behavior may have been undergoing a change during recent years. First, the frequencies of ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’ were similar in Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies as shown in Table 4 but increased dramatically from Yuan’s (2002) data to the present data. More specifically, the occurrence of ‘explicit compliments’ rises from 62% to 77.2% and ‘implicit compliments’ from 4.3% to 21.9%. These figures revealed that the Taiwan and Mainland Chinese speakers in the present study offered ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’ considerably more frequently than Mainland Chinese and Kunming Chinese in Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies respectively. Second, the ‘opt-out’ strategy has been significantly infrequent since Yuan’s (2002) study. Chinese speakers seem to be more willing to express their positive intentions either explicitly or implicitly instead of refraining from showing their admiration, lending support to Chang’s (2001) finding that Chinese speakers are not necessarily reserved in expressing their thoughts, either positive or negative. This might be due to the impact of western cultures, as indicated by an interviewee in Yuan’s (2002) research. In this latter study, it was suggested by the interviewee that nowadays the way Kunming Chinese complimented others was different from the older generation as they had been influenced by western civilizations through movies or other means of mass media. This claim is supported in a recent study by Chen and Yang (2010), a replication of Chen’s study (1993) on Chinese compliment responses. These authors noted that Xi’an Chinese in Mainland China tended to accept instead of reject compliments as they used to do. A similar changing style has been observed in compliment responses by Taiwan Chinese (Hsu, 2010). Chen and Yang (2010) attributed this change to “the influx of Western cultural influences” as speakers of western languages normally accept compliments (Chen and Yang, 2010:1951). Moreover, as American English has been the main English variety for most students in Taiwan and Mainland China, their cultural values may have been directly or indirectly embedded in English textbooks or transferred from teachers of American native speakers, American films or TV programs[5]. The high frequency of compliments by Americans has been widely recognized in a number of studies (Wolfson, 1981; Nelson et al., 1993; Fong, 1998). It is possible therefore that the young generation might be adopting the western ways of communication which are deviant from Chinese traditions. Since all of the respondents in the present study were college/university students, this might explain why there are remarkable differences in the frequencies of these three compliment strategies between the present study and Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies as shown in Table 4.

To sum up, compared with previous studies, the present study indicated that an increasing number of Chinese speakers are inclined to express their positive intentions when compliments are desirable, with most of them in favor of ‘explicit compliments’. These differences might result from the influence of western cultures. Moreover, the vast majority of Chinese compliments were formulaic in terms of the strategies employed. The participants in Taiwan and Mainland China preferred to offer ‘explicit compliments’, ‘implicit requests’, ‘implicit assumptions’ and ‘implicit want statements’ as compliments. Generally, more similarities were identified between Taiwan and Mainland Chinese speakers with respect to the frequency of compliment strategies across the situations.

2 Situational variations in compliment strategies across regions

1 Explicit compliments

Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of ‘explicit compliments’ between Taiwan and Mainland Chinese in terms of compliment topics. In each of the two regions, the explicit strategy was equally employed in appearance/possession-related and performance/ability-related situations. Compared with Ye’s (1995) finding, ‘explicit compliments’ were more frequent in the present study (50.5% compared to 43% in Ye’s study) for appearance/possession situations and less frequent (49.5% compared to 69.9% in Ye’s study) for performance/ability scenarios. In Ye’s (1995) study, complimenting on performance seemed to be perceived as more appropriate than complimenting on appearance due to higher frequencies of ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’ and lower occurrences of ‘opt-outs’ and non-complimentary responses in performance contexts (as noted in section 2.1). Nevertheless, in the present study, the results suggested that compliment topic did not influence the frequency of ‘explicit compliments’ in either of the two groups studied (Fig. 1). This indicated that appearance/possession and performance/ability were considered to be equally appropriate for the Chinese respondents in the current study to offer compliments explicitly.

[pic]

Fig. 1. The distribution of ‘explicit compliments’ by region and compliment topics.

2 Implicit compliments

Detailed analyses of the three popular implicit strategies showed that, in both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese, ‘implicit request’ and ‘implicit assumption’ compliments mostly appeared in performance-based situations. This was particularly notable in ‘implicit assumption’ compliments. However, the bulk of ‘implicit want statements’ occurred in appearance/possession-related contexts as shown in Fig. 2 below. In particular, ‘implicit requests’ and ‘implicit assumptions’ were more likely to be employed by Chinese students to compliment their classmates’ accomplishments in class presentation (situation 2). This implied that the students in both Taiwan and Mainland China focused more attention on academic performance by either asking for some useful information to advance their presentation skills or emphasizing their peers’ past effort to deliver a successful presentation. The italicised sentence in the first example below (1) shows how an ‘implicit request’ compliment was offered in the Class Presentation situation. The instance in (2) is an ‘implicit assumption’ compliment that implicitly revealed the speaker’s approval of the addressee’s performance in a talent show.

[pic]Fig. 2. The distribution of ‘implicit request’, ‘implicit assumption’ and ‘implicit want statement’ strategies by region and compliment topics.

1) Implicit request: TM10[6] in the Class Presentation situation

|Nǐde |jiǎnbào |hěn |bù |cuò |ō. |Kě |

|say |you |always |how |prepare |DE |Q |

你的簡報很不錯哦! 可不可以跟我說你都是怎麼準備的嗎?

(Your presentation was very good. Could you tell me how you prepared for it?)

2) Implicit assumption: MM15 in the Talent Show situation

|Nǐde |biǎoyǎn  |tài |bàng |le. |Wǒ |rènwéi  |nǐ |

|your |performance |too |great |PFV |I |think |you |

|yīdìng  |kěyǐ  |jìnrù  |qián |sān |míng. |

|definitely |can |enter |first |three |rank |

你的表演太棒了, 我认为你一定可以进入前三名.

(Your performance was brilliant. I think you will definitely be one of the top three.)

Unlike ‘implicit requests’ and ‘implicit assumptions’, ‘implicit want statements’ were overwhelmingly associated with such possession items like a mobile phone or a handbag. A typical expression is the example (3) below which implicitly attributed the credit to the complimented item, namely, a mobile phone in this case, as people normally buy things which they evaluate positively (Yuan, 2002). Overall, the speakers of Taiwan and Mainland Chinese shared some commonalities in their employment of these three implicit compliment strategies. That is, they both preferred to offer ‘implicit request’ and ‘implicit assumption’ compliments in performance-related situations and ‘implicit want statements’ in appearance/possession-related contexts.

3) Implicit want statement: MF8 in the Mobile Phone situation

|Shǒujī |zhēn |piàoliàng! |Yàoshì |wǒ |shǒujī  |huài |le, |

|mobile phone |very |pretty |if |my |mobile phone |broken |PFV |

|yě |huàn |yī  |gè |zhèyàng |de. |Tài |kù |le. |

|also |change |one |CL |such |DE |too |cool |PFV |

     

手机真漂亮! 要是我手机坏了, 也换一个这样的. 太酷了!

([Your] mobile phone is really wonderful! If mine is broken, I would like to buy the same one as yours. So cool!)

[pic]

Fig. 3. The distribution of ‘implicit admiration’ compliments by region and compliment topics.

Moreover, in the present study, all of the ‘implicit admiration’ compliments were identified in performance-related situations except one in relation to appearance as shown in Figure 3 above. The admiration strategy was mainly offered to implicate that the addressee was a learning model for the speaker. As discussed earlier, most of the ‘implicit admiration’ compliments were provided by Mainland Chinese. This suggested that apart from the frequent occurrences of ‘implicit request’ and ‘implicit assumption’ compliments in performance-related situations, the students in Mainland China were also inclined to compliment their peers’ achievements by employing the ‘implicit admiration’ strategy. The following example is given from a Mainland Chinese male respondent in the Basketball Competition situation.

4) Implicit admiration: MM20 in the Basketball Competition situation

|Bú |cuò, |bú |cuò, |dǎ |de |zhēn  |hǎo! |Jīntiān |

|this |CL |competition |ADV |really |very |hard |say |PRT |

|Yǐhòu |háiyào  |duō |gēn |nǐ |xuéxí |ya! |

|later |still |more |follow |you |learn |PRT |

不错, 不错, 打得真好! 今天没有你, 这场比赛还真的很难说呀! 以后还要多跟你学习呀!

(Well done! Well done! [You] played really well! Without you, we might hardly win the competition today. I would to like to learn [some basketball skills] from you.)

3 Opt-outs

As shown in Figure 4, in both Taiwan and Mainland China, all of the ‘opt-outs’ occurred in performance- or possession-related situations, seven in performance- (70%) and three in possession-based contexts (30%). In other words, when compliment topics were associated with appearance, all the Chinese participants in the present study chose to offer compliments instead of ‘opt-outs’ whereas this was not the case in performance- or possession-related situations. This implied that appearance was perceived as an appropriate topic by both Taiwan and Mainland Chinese respondents to compliment their peers. The popularity of appearance compliments among Taiwan Chinese students in the current study corresponded to Wang and Tsai’s (2003) findings that appearance was identified as a more preferred topic of compliments for Taiwan Chinese college students. Furthermore, the common occurrence of appearance compliments in Taiwan Chinese is further evidence of the influence of western cultures as it resembles the social norms relevant to compliments in America (Wang and Tsai, 2003), where the quality of ‘newness’ is highly valued so that it is socially acceptable to praise someone seen with something new (Wolfson, 1989). Wang and Tsai (2003) mentioned that a compliment signals the speaker’s notice of a change in the addressee who is worthy of attention. Nevertheless, the evidence in the present study was in contrast to Ye’s (1995) finding that compliments on performance were preferred by Mainland Chinese. In Ye’s (1995) study, ‘opt-outs’ were more likely to occur in appearance- (35.2%) rather than performance-related situations (12.6%). In the present study, there was no occurrence of ‘opt-outs’ on appearance in Mainland Chinese data. Moreover, as indicated in section 4.2.1, appearance/possession and performance/ability were perceived to be equally appropriate for the Chinese respondents in the current study to perform ‘explicit compliments’. The evidence above suggested that Mainland Chinese speakers’ preferences for compliment topics might have shifted after more than two decades, also possibly affected by western cultures.

[pic]

Fig. 4. The distribution of ‘opt-outs’ by region and compliment topics.

The above analyses revealed how the micro-social variable, compliment topic, interacted with the macro-social factor, region. Chinese students in Taiwan and Mainland China intended to utilize a variety of compliment strategies in similar ways across appearance/possession and performance/ability situations. Put differently, the occurrences of compliment strategies varied according to the topics of compliments, regardless of the varieties of Mandarin Chinese. The evidence from the present study suggested that situational variation was more influential than the effect of region with regard to the speech act of compliments.

Conclusion

The current study contributes to the field of variational pragmatics by investigating a speech act (compliments), in an under-researched non-Indo-European language, Chinese. In terms of regional variation, the study indicated that there were more intra-lingual similarities than differences between Taiwan and Mainland Chinese compliments. For example, the student participants in the two regions exhibited clear preferences for ‘explicit compliments’, in keeping with previous studies. Furthermore, both groups employed three implicit compliment strategies more frequently comprising ‘implicit requests’, ‘implicit assumptions’ and ‘implicit want statements’, though situational differences were identified in the two varieties of Chinese, with the first two strategies appearing more in performance situations and the last in appearance- or possession-related scenarios. With regard to intra-lingual variations, Mainland Chinese respondents produced significantly more ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit admiration’ compliments whereas Taiwan Chinese participants offered more ‘implicit request’ compliments. The findings in the present study lend support to Barron and Schneider’s (2009) argument that pragmatic variations do indeed exist between different varieties of the same language.

This study does not attempt to and cannot generalize the findings to represent Chinese speakers in either Taiwan or Mainland China for two reasons. First, the participants were sampled from only one area in each region and thus the data were not fully representative of large populations. Second, the data were generated from a DCT which elicits the pragmatic knowledge and perceptions of a cultural group instead of their actual language performance. Consequently, further research could focus on Chinese participants from other areas or even other regions, for instance, Hong Kong and Singapore, by employing a range of elicitation instruments (for example, role play) in order to gather speech acts in interaction (Kasper, 2006). In addition, the issue of individual variability was not addressed in the current study, a subject for future investigations. It should also be noted that none of the compliment strategies in the present study were exclusively employed by either Taiwan Chinese or Mainland Chinese. That is, the compliment strategies identified were not region-exclusive but region-preferential, a matter of weighting of one strategy over the other(s) by a specific group of speakers.

As Schneider and Barron (2008) indicate, the future tasks in variational pragmatics are to determine which values are preferred in specific regional varieties of a language and whether other national or sub-national cultures are equally homogeneous or heterogeneous in the aspects under investigation. Since the vast majority of Chinese compliments in the present study were realized in merely four compliment strategies, there seems to be some evidence that Chinese compliments appear to be predictable on the strategic level. It is proposed that compliments are formulaic not merely on the syntactic and semantic levels across languages but also on the strategic level but further research in variational pragmatics is needed to explore this notion. Moreover, in light of previous studies on compliments of different English varieties, the present investigation indicated that Chinese compliments may be converging towards western cultures to some extent. As discussed in section 4.1.3, in comparison with Ye’s (1995) and Yuan’s (2002) studies, there were higher frequencies in the present study of ‘explicit compliments’ and ‘implicit compliments’ while the frequency of ‘opt-outs’ was remarkably lower in the current study as compared to previous studies. Possibly influenced by some westerners’ generosity in offering compliments, Chinese speakers may be more willing to express their positive intentions either explicitly or implicitly instead of refraining from showing their admiration. Moreover, in line with widespread appearance compliments in American English (Yu, 2005), compliments on appearance have become more popular in Chinese as evidenced in the present data. It is possible that these two noteworthy instances may reflect an ongoing change in cultural values and social norms regarding Chinese compliments. Future studies might fruitfully explore the extent to which the influence of western cultures is also evident in other speech acts or at other levels of analysis.

Appendix A

Written Discourse Completion Task for Taiwanese Students

Situation 1 (Mobile Phone Situation)

A student compliments his/her male classmate on his new mobile phone.

你和同學王正凱已經同班了二年，並有著共同的興趣－彈吉他，因而加入了民謠吉他社。課後，你們常會一起練吉他。現在是午餐時間，正當你們用餐到一半時，他的手機響了，你發現他換了新手機，你喜歡這支的造型和功能，你會對他說：

Situation 2 (Class Presentation Situation)

A student compliments his/her female classmate on her good presentation.

這學期，你和林欣怡因選修了同一門英文課而認識。有時，你們會在圖書館一起唸書。修此課的學生均須完成一份企劃。現已接近學期末，今天每位同學都要上台作簡報。林欣怡報告時，充滿自信，有不錯的表現，你覺得她的簡報很有趣，也很有條理。下課後，你走向她並對她說：

Situation 3 (Hair Style Situation)

A student compliments his/her male classmate on his new hairstyle.

剛開學第一週，你正要去圖書館還暑假期間借閱的書。在去圖書館的路上，你遇見了同學陳松翰。你們去年曾選修同一門科目。暑假時，你們有時會相約出去或一起看電影。你發現他換了新髮型，覺得此髮型很適合他，你走向他並對他說：

Situation 4 (Handbag Situation)

A student compliments his/her female friend on her new handbag.

今天是你好朋友李佩姍的生日，你們從小學相識至今，一直都有保持聯絡。在生日派對上，你發現她戴了一個新款的包包。你上週末逛街時，就已注意到這款包包。這時，你會對她說：

Situation 5 (Basketball Competition Situation)

A student compliments his/her male classmate on his excellent performance in a basketball competition.

今天是學校的運動會，下午有場校際籃球比賽。你的同學劉志成將代表你們學校參加比賽。他很有運動細胞，球技很好，是籃球社社長。你們已認識了二年。最近，你也迷上此項運動，和他一起打籃球。你們學校贏得了比賽，賽後，你走向他並對他說：

Situation 6 (Weight Loss Situation)

A student compliments his/her female friend on her weight loss.

某個星期六下午，你在市區逛街時，遇見了中學時期的同學陳嘉綺。以前，你們下課後有時會玩在一起。畢業後，仍偶爾會保持聯絡。因為你們很久沒碰面，你發現她變瘦了，也變得更漂亮了，你走向她並對她說：

Situation 7 (PE Test Situation)

A student compliments his/her male classmate on his success in physical education (PE) test.

每到學期末，體育課都要做體能測試，你同學張偉哲每次都輕易通過考試。你們都是登山社的成員，假日常會去爬山，知道他的體力很好，是個運動健將。今天的體能測驗，他依然順利通過，這時，你會對他說：

Situation 8 (Talent Show Situation)

A student compliments his/her female junior uni-mate on her good performance in a talent show.

今天學校舉辦了才藝表演比賽，前三名的參賽者將獲得大奬，因此吸引許多學生報名參加。有一位學妹林玉婷正在台上演奏鋼琴。之前，你曾在校園看過她，也跟她說過數次話。你非常喜歡她的表演，演奏後，你會對她說：

Sample of the situation 1 for Mainland Chinese students

A student compliments his/her male classmate on his new mobile phone.

你和同学王正凯已经同班了两年，并有着共同的兴趣—弹吉他，因而加入了民谣吉他社。课后，你们常会一起练吉他。现在是午饭时间，正当你们用餐到一半时，他的手机响了，你发现他换了新手机，你喜欢这支手机的造型和功能，你会对他说：

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* Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 7799082425.

Email addresses: rebecca.lin@bristol.ac.uk (C. Y. Lin), helen.woodfield@bristol.ac.uk (H. Woodfield), renweixz@ (W. Ren).

[1] The major difference between micro-social and macro-social factors is that the former relates to speaker constellations and might vary from situation to situation while the latter concerns individual speakers and remains comparatively stable across different contexts (Schneider and Barron, 2008; Barron and Schneider, 2009). Thus, micro-social variation is sometimes called “situational variation” (Schneider and Barron, 2008:18).

[2] The claims in the following sections were applied to the participants in the current study only. Thus, the terms, Taiwan Chinese and Mainland Chinese, do not refer to general Chinese speakers in the respective regions. The results might vary according to other factors, for instance, age and social status.

[3] All Chinese examples in this paper were from the participants in the present study and represented in their original forms. Thus, some sentences were written in simplified Chinese if they were given by Mainland Chinese students and some in traditional Chinese if they were produced by Taiwanese respondents.

[4] Differences between traditional and simplified Chinese were identified in the lexicon appearing in compliments. For example, the adjective “牛” (i.e., brilliant) was used by Mainland Chinese participants only to compliment a person’s performance and the adjective “正” (i.e., good-looking) was employed by Taiwan Chinese respondents only to praise a female’s appearance. The lexical differences between the two varieties of Chinese were beyond the scope of the present study and may be explored in future research.

[5] This claim does not deny the fact that the students in Taiwan and Mainland China are influenced by other English cultures as well, for instance, British English, New Zealand English or Canadian English, as the movies or TV programs of these varieties are easily accessible through mass media or the Internet. Furthermore, some English classes are instructed by English-speaking teachers other than Americans. However, the mainstream remains to be American English in both regions.

[6] The first letter of this abbreviation stands for region, that is, T for Taiwan Chinese and M for Mainland Chinese. The second letter refers to the gender, namely, M for male and F for female. The following number is used to replace their real names.

[7] The abbreviations used in the interlinear translation are as follows, adopted from Wang and Tsai (2003): PRT = clause final particle, Q = final question marker, PFV = perfective aspect marker, CL = classifier, ADV = adverb.

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