Contact us
 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
Useful Links
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
Linguistic Features of Chinese Teachers’ Complimenting Behaviors
Author(s)
Chen Cheng-hui, Liu Hao
Full-Text PDF
XML 1004 Views
DOI:10.17265/2161-6248/2015.11.006
Affiliation(s)
Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing, China
ABSTRACT
Researchers
have revealed valuable insights into complimenting behaviors in a variety of
contexts in the past decades. However, few documents about complimenting in the
context of teaching and education can be found, except for the study of Johnson
(1992). To fill the research gap, this study proposes to focus on the
compliments of Chinese teachers. This research collected a corpus of 183
Chinese compliments of teachers through observing or interviewing a number of
teachers and students from some primary and high schools in Nanjing. Analyses
were made on the levels of lexicon, syntax, semantics, and discourse. On the
lexical level, adjectives, in contrast to verbs and nouns, were preferred to
serve as the carriers. Compared with the findings about English compliments,
the adjectives in the Chinese teaching context were more varied. The
examination on the syntax of compliments revealed a similar patterned feature
to that in English compliments. A special attention was paid to such mitigating
devices as “I feel” and “Is it right,” which were considered as politeness
strategies to redress the face threatening force of compliments. The contents
of teachers’ compliments were pre-conditioned by the task of teaching and
education, so they were mainly directed at the performance, personal qualities,
words, or thoughts of students. The discourse analysis of compliments revealed
six types of complimenting discourse patterns, which were one or a series of
independent complimenting utterances or combinations of compliments with such
expressions as new information, criticisms, or directions. This paper serves as
the guide for teachers’ complimenting strategies.
KEYWORDS
compliment, lexical item, syntactic pattern, discourse pattern, Chinese teachers
Cite this paper
References