Responses to compliments and to compliment responses: The interaction of self-denigration and self-enhancement in Mandarin compliment sequences

• In Event: Top Four Papers in the Language and Social Interaction Division

Abstract

In a seminal paper on compliment responses in American English, Pomerantz (1978) describes how such responses can be seen as subject to the co-operation of multiple conflicting preferences – the preference for avoiding self-praise and the preference for accepting and agreeing with the compliment. Employing Conversation Analysis as its theoretical framework, this paper reports on a study based on 10 hours of naturally occurring conversational data collected in Beijing, China, and presents findings on how such multiple preferences figure in the organization of compliment responses in Mandarin conversation.

In the first part of this paper, I will demonstrate that whereas the constraint of self-praise does seem to be at work in the organization of Mandarin compliment responses, the common solution to such a constraint is not with outright rejection of compliments as previously claimed (e.g., Chen 1993), but rather with responses which downgrade or otherwise qualify prior compliment assertions (cf. Golato 2005, Pomerantz 1978, Ye 1995). The second part of the paper will focus on turns subsequent to responses to compliments. I will demonstrate how participants’ responses in this sequential context are themselves sensitive to a related set of preferences, and will examine how violation of these preferences can frequently lead to violation of the otherwise commonly observed constraint of self-praise, prompting interlocutors to engage in self-enhancing work.

Author

• Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu, San Diego State University