Compliments and Compliment Responses in Kunming Chinese

Abstract

The way compliments & compliment responses are executed in Kunming Chinese, a Mandarin dialect spoken in Kunming, China, are described. The semantic formulas used in forming compliments & compliment responses & the syntactic patterns of compliments are examined in data collected via discourse completion task (DCT) questionnaires & natural observation. It is found that explicit compliments are the most common form of complimenting in the dialect. Implicit compliments, on the other hand, are much rarer & tend to occur by themselves. Syntactically, over 90% of the compliments fell into one of four syntactic structures utilizing the third person/impersonal & second person perspectives. In replying to a compliment, speakers of Kunming Chinese are found to be drifting away from the tradition of rejecting compliments outright; they are now more willing to accept compliments, although often indirectly: a quarter of the time, in real life situations, they just smiled compliments away. While the DCT data & natural data are similar in the use of a majority of the semantic formulas, some differences are also found between the two types of data. Some methodological & cross cultural implications are discussed in conclusion.