A Retrospective Analysis of Chinese Obligatory Compliments Strategies Use: Keeping Polite in Managing Interpersonal Relationships

Abstract: Compliments are a common speech act in interpersonal communications that have a role in building rapport. Compliments vary greatly from culture to culture in terms of strategies and functions. Different from the compliments used in other cultures, Chinese people are concerned with face and emphasize harmony, so they often use compliments as a pragmatic strategy to build rapport. Thus, He Ziran proposes the concept of “Chinese Obligatory Compliments (COCs)” from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics, pointing out that these are a kind of compliment response strategies (CRs) that Chinese people will make self-denigration and return compliments towards others' compliments to keep modesty and politeness in Chinese context so as to build rapport. So, this thesis aims to analyze what are COCs? What specific strategies of COCs will adopt to keep modesty so as to build rapport? How to make a retrospective analysis of COCs from socio-cultural factors? In order to address these questions, this thesis proposes an integrated model based on the Rapport Management Theory by Spencer-Oatey and the Politeness Principle by Gu Yueguo to analyze the collected data of COCs from some Chinese TV dramas. Consequently, this study finds there are four strategies of COCs as the CRs that keep polite and build rapport. Then, the COCs are interpreted from Chinese socio-cultural factors, so as to promote the localization of interpersonal pragmatics and introduce more language phenomenon with Chinese characteristics to the world.