Compliments and Refusals in a Traditional Chinese City

Language mirrors reality. Speech act, as a part of pragmatics, has been a meaningful starting point for cross-cultural study scholars and second language teachers to seek the unsaid myth behind the language itself. This article mainly centers on the examination of two main speech acts: compliment and refusal in traditional China to solicit their respective contrastive Chinese cultural values encased in their dialogues and ways of addressing. Meanwhile, this article makes the point that the change prompted by contemporary China’s social, political, and economic transformations also contributes to the variations of a multitude of conditioned speech acts.