Gender And Language Use Of Compliments In English

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but also promote and gear up the social communications. As a specific speech act, compliments are universal linguistic and sociocultural phenomena and are highly and frequently used in human communications. Consequently, how to pay compliments constitutes one of the significant parts of communicative competence of every member in a speech community. However, compliments tend to be a "troublesome aspect of English for learners from different cultural backgrounds" (Holmes & Brown, 1987). At the same, gender makes great influence on language styles. Men and women have different intonation, vocabulary and language strategies when making compliments. This paper intends to compare, analyze and discuss compliments of two genders in English from the pragmatic perspective. Relevant background theories of language and culture, pragmatics as well as speech acts will be first reviewed. Examples of compliments of two genders in English will then be presented and analyzed to focus on the ...

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age, social status and social distance. Among all others, gender is a major topic in sociolinguistics and has been explored as an important factor in language use. When people of different genders show their preference, likes and admiration to somebody or something, there are obvious differences. And studies show that gender has great effect on social behavior and interactions. Now the present study is going to combine these two important subjects in an attempt to study compliment behavior under gender's influence.
This paper consists of basic knowledge of pragmatics and detailed comparison of gender and compliments in English. Specific comparisons are in relation to vocabulary, ...

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