an investigation of gender differences in responding to compliments = sự khác biệt về giới trong cách tiếp nhận lời khen

Vietnam national university, hanoi College of foreign languages Department of Postgraduate Studies HOÀNG THỊ MINH ÁNH An investigation of gender differences in responding to compliments (Sự khác biệt giới cách tiếp nhận lời khen) M.A Thesis Minor program thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15 Hanoi – 2009 Vietnam national university, hanoi College of foreign languages Department of Postgraduate Studies HOÀNG THỊ MINH ÁNH An investigation of gender differences in responding to compliments (Sự khác biệt giới cách tiếp nhận lời khen) M.A Thesis Minor program thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15 Supervisor: DR HÀ CẨM TÂM Hanoi – 2009 vi Table of contents Certificate of originality of thesis ………………………………… i Acknowledgements………………………………………………………… ii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………… ii List of Tables …………………………………………………………………… iv List of abbreviations and conventions……………………………… v Part 1: Introduction………………………………………………………… 1 Rationale……………………………………………………………………… Aims of the study…………………………………………………………… Scope of the study…………………………………………………………… Method of the study………………………………………………………… Organization of the study…………………………………………………… Part 2: Development………………………………………………………… Chapter 1: Literature Review………………………………………… 1.1 Overview of speech acts…………………………………………………………… 1.2 Compliment and compliment responses………………………………………… 1.2.1 Complimenting as a speech act…………………………………………… 1.2.2 Function of compliment…………………………………………………… 1.2.3 Compliment responses……………………………………………………… 1.3 Politeness ………………………………………………………………………… 11 1.3.1 Definition of politeness……………………………………………………… 11 1.3.2 The face-saving view of politeness………………………………………… 12 1.3.3 Politeness in complimenting and responding to compliments……………… 14 1.3.4 Gender and politeness……………………………………………………… 15 1.4 Previous studies of gender in compliment and compliment responses………… 17 vii Chapter 2: The study………………………………………………………… 19 2.1 The research designing…………………………………………………………… 19 2.1.1 The research question……………………………………………………… 19 2.1.2 Selection of informants……………………………………………………… 19 2.1.3 Data collection instruments………………………………………………… 19 2.1.4 Situation design……………………………………………………………… 20 2.1.5 Data-collecting procedures………………………………………………… 21 2.2 Analytical Framework…………………………………………………………… 22 Chapter 3: Data analysis and discussion………………………… 25 3.1 Data analysis procedures……………………………………………………… 25 3.2 Results…………………………………………………………………………… 26 3.2.1 Compliment response strategies by males of the topic dimension………… 26 3.2.2 Compliment response strategies by females of the topic dimension……… 27 3.2.3 Compliment response strategies by gender ………………………………… 28 3.2.4 Summary…………………………………………………………………… 30 3.3 Discussions………………………………………………………………………… 31 Part 3: Conclusion…………………………………………………………… 36 Major findings………………………………………………………………… 36 Implications……………………………………………………………………… 37 Suggestions for further research……………………………………………… 38 References…………………………………………………………………… 40 Appendix ………………………………………………………………………… I iv List of Tables Table No TITLE Table 3.2.1: Compliment response strategies by males Table 3.2.2: Compliment response strategies by genders 26 Compliment response strategies by females Table 3.2.3: PAGE 28 29 v List of abbreviations AT Appreciation Token App Appearance CA Comment Acceptance CH Comment History D Disagreement DCTs Discourse Completion Tests FSA Face saving act FTAs Face threatening acts NA No Acknowledgement Per Performance Pos Possession PU Praise Upgrade Qual Qualification Ques Question Rea Reassignment Ret Return RI Request Interpretations SD Scale Down Part 1: Introduction Rationale In everyday life, there are a number of speech acts we can choose to show positive politeness, for example, greetings, hanks, friendly address terms and expressions of concern ―A compliment is one of them, which notice and attend the hearer‘s interests, wants, needs, goods ‖ (Holmes: 1988) Since 1970s, linguists have attached the study of speech act, such as Apology, Request, Compliment & Compliment Response, Refusal and Complaint, etc These studies show that, the social and situational factors, which will exert their influences on the use of the speech acts, include gender, age, level of education, social distance, social relationship, style, and ethnicity and so on Compliments, as a positive speech act, will be inevitably influenced by these social factors Although pragmatists and sociolinguists have examined the relationship between gender and language for the last thirty years, there is little consensus about this relationship As far as female speech is concerned, arguments continue to focus on whether or not female speakers express powerlessness in their speech or whether they express a form of speech only different from that of males by using, for example, more polite speech style Of the social causes of gender differentiation in speech style, one of the most critical appears to be the level of education In all studies, it has been shown that the greater the disparities between educational opportunities for boys and girls, the greater the differences between male and female speech (Spolsky, 2000) The more recent feminist theory has focused on the social construction of gender, not exclusively in childhood but for a whole lifetime, and this seems to be more powerful in explaining gender differences in language use Compliments are positive speech acts, which are sensitive to both social constraints and individual variables Social factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, social status and social relationship between the interlocutors will inevitably influence the complimenting behavior of all interlocutors Several studies have shown that there are some differences between males and females in their realization patterns of compliments and compliment responses Two important studies that focus on gender differences in complimenting and responding to compliments are those by Holmes (1988) and Herbert (1990) They found that the syntactic patterns and lexical choice used by men and women were different Based on the findings, they assumed that females use compliments for keeping solidarity while males regard compliments as potential face threatening acts (FTAs) They examined kinds of topics and situations, as well as gender-based distributions Although a lot of research has been carried out on compliments and compliment responses, the study on relationship between genders in compliment responses is still something new in Vietnam The purpose of this study is to examine the sociolinguistic characteristics of gender differences in compliment responses, in other words, whether the social variables of the interlocutors, namely, social status, gender and age, have any influence on the compliment response strategies the respondent may employ Aims of the study This study examines the differences of linguistic strategies between British women‘s and men‘s compliment responding, exploring the function of the positive speech acts as positive strategies The study provides an analysis concerning the differences between the same genders and the different genders in compliment responds strategies The reason why men and women differ in language use is that they often different role in society Scope of the study The study focuses on the differences of linguistic strategies between British male and female subjects in the workplace in responding to compliments in some daily situations in terms of linguistic strategies The data we can obtain from the Discourse Completion Tests will show us only nonverbal Gender is the main variable in the present study There are four types of compliment situations with regard to the gender of complimenters and respondents: male – male, malefemale, and female - male, female - female In each of the situations designed in the questionnaires, there are two possibilities of the gender group That is to say, the two interlocutors in each situation might be of the same gender or might be of different genders This may influence the production or selection of compliment response strategies The study is based on the analytical framework established by Herbert (1986), but modified by the author for the present study Method of the study This study focuses mainly on analysis of the data collected from the survey questionnaire The questionnaire is designed to elicit the informants‘ compliment responses in the situations under study The data collection of this research is done by using the Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) It is believed that DCTs constitute important starting points for further research since they facilitate the collection of large amount of data Each discourse sequence presented a detailed description of the situation, specifying the gender and social status of the complimenter The participants‘ task was supply the responses to the situation given The data we can obtain from the DCTs will show us only ―discourse in written form‖ Organization of the study This research includes three parts Part introduces the rationale, the aims, the scope and the method of the study Part is the development of the study There are four Chapters in this part Chapter one will review briefly the related theories, such as speech acts, politeness, review of the studies on compliments and compliment responses Chapter two discusses the methodology of the study, which includes the research questions, design of the study, the selection of subjects, instruments, situation design, analytical framework and the procedures of data collecting and analyzing In Chapter Three, this paper will show the results of the study In Chapter Four, this paper will give discussions and the major findings of the results obtained in the research And finally in Part 3, this paper will briefly summarize the major discoveries of this study, indicate the limitations and implications of the study and point out the directions for further research Part 2: Development Chapter 1: Literature Review This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical background of the research These theories include theories on speech act, politeness The theories will build up the theoretical framework of this study 1.1 Overview of speech acts Although many theories have studied speech act theory, generally all of them share the common theme that speech acts are the actions that are involved when some one says something According to Searle (1969:24), language is part of a theory of action, and speech acts are those verbal acts such as promising, threatening and requesting that one perform in speaking George Yule (1996:47) defines that actions performed via utterance are generally called speech acts, and in English, are commonly given more specific labels such as apology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise, or request The circumstances in which actions are performed via utterances are called the speech events In many ways, it is the nature of the speech event that determines the interpretation of an utterance as performing a particular speech act For example, on a wintry day, the speaker reaches for a cup of tea, believing that it has been freshly made, takes a sip, and produces the utterance “This tea is really cold” This utterance can be interpreted as a complaint Changing the circumstances to really hot summer day with the speaker being given a glass of iced tea by the hearer, taking a sip and producing the same utterance “This tea is really cold” This utterance is likely to be interpreted as praise If the same utterance can be interpreted as different kinds of speech act, then obviously no simple one utterance to one action correspondence will be possible It also means that there is more to the interpretation of a speech act than can be found in the utterance alone According to Austin (1962), the action performed by producing an utterance will consist of three related acts: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act 31 AGREEMENT on performance and possession more than on appearance On the contrary, female respondents show a higher frequency in using AGREEMENT on appearance and possession more than on performance Specifically, more women employ AGREEMENT than men From these findings, it can be indicate that there is significant relationship between the variable gender and compliment response strategies And, it can be put forward that, generally, women tend to use more polite strategies and politeness markers than men in the compliment response realization patterns In the previous section, the paper has found the result of the study In the next section, the paper will give discussions and then try to explain the gender - based differences 3.3 Discussions This section will discuss the similarities and differences between British males and females in using strategies of compliment responses to answers the research questions: Are there any differences of linguistic strategies between British males and females in responding to compliments? Are female speakers more polite than male speakers? We observe a noticeable difference between men and woman in how they respond to a compliment if we examine the common response types within the thirteen categories Using the classifications presented by Herbert (1986), taxonomy was designed (Table 2.3.1) Of the observable data, 50% of the responses were issued by females and 50% by males This provided a dimension that simplified analysis by biological gender An examination of the totals indicates that nearly one-half of all responses are in the form of an appreciation token (i.e., a simple Thank you) Most of the subjects use Appreciation token + other sub-categories for their compliment response utterances This finding is similar to Brown and Levinson‘s research (1978) They found that people in the west will respond to others complimenting happily with “thank you” to satisfy the conplimenter‘s positive face Here are some examples in the data: - Thank you, I‟m please with it (M, S1 Laptop) - Thank you, I had it cut yesterday (F, S2 Haircut) 32 - Thank you, that very nice of you (M, S3 Article) - Thank you, I like it too (F, S4 Presenting) In the data, male respondents show a tendency to use APPRECIATION TOKEN and COMMENT APPRECIATION, whereas female respondents show a preference for APPRECIATION TOKEN and COMMENT HISTORY For examples: - Thanks, I‟m very pleased with it ( M, S1 Laptop) - Thank you, I bought it last week (F, S1 Laptop) - Thanks so much, I must say I‟m also really happy with it (M, S6 Car) - Thanks I bought it in Harrods (F, S6 Car) To be specific, by choosing to avoid self-praise, females tend to employ the SCALE DOWN and QUESTION response type to weaken the complimentary force, but males favor SCALE DOWN, DISAGREEMENT and QUESTION to deny that force The data of this study reveals that although the respondents not accept the compliment explicitly, they not show a tendency to reject it In fact, they use Agreement rather often This finding is similar to Holmes‘s and Ye's research Home (1986) found that males will ignore or legitimately evade a compliment more often than women will At the same time, when men are complimented, she says that they tend to ignore or evade a compliment more than women She claims that men seem to avoid a verbal response altogether by ignoring the compliment or responding to other topics or to the focus of the previous utterance Specifically, New Zealand men tend to interpret compliments as FTAs more readily than their female counterparts, with the latter usually treating them as strategies for maintaining solidarity Ye‘s result (1995) also showed that male and female respondents adopted different strategies Specifically, males chose Non-Acceptance more often than females, whereas females showed a much stronger tendency to Acceptance The data show that, based on same-gender and different-gender dimension Male responses also seem to corroborate with initial expectations The responses to females by males tend toward Agreement, while the responses to other males tend toward Noagreements In contrast, the responses to females by females are employed more Agreement than the responses to males by females This finding is similar to Wolfson‘s (1984), she examined the compliment behavior of Americans and found women used compliments more often to other women than they did to men or than men did to each other But it is different from Herbert analysis of responses to compliment Herbert (1990) 33 found that compliments offered by males to females are more likely to be accepted On the other hand, those offered by a female to another female are more likely to be rejected Here are some examples in the data - You are lucky! It let me down last week (M-m, S5 Car) - Thanks That‟s very nice of you (M-f, S3 Article) - Thank you Let me know if you need it again (F-M, S5 Car) - Thanks I‟m pleased you like it (F-f, S3 Article) We can clearly see a difference in the topic dimension between English males and females Complimenting on appearance, hair and suit, in S2 and S6 has a different tendency in males‘ and females‘ respective compliment response strategies Specifically, females show a stronger tendency to Agreement, whereas males use a bit more Noagreement than females For examples: - Thanks It‟s a bit shorter than I worked (M, S2 Hair) - Thank you I had it done yesterday F, S2 Hair) On the other hand, it indicates that men use more Agreement and No-agreement than women This is especially reflected in S3 Article and S4 Presenting for performance Males tend to use Agreement - Thank you I‟m pleased with the result too (M, S3 Article) - Thank so much for telling me (M, S4 Presenting) Another interesting feature is found in S1 Laptop and S5 Car for possession, in which males use much more No- agreement than females The typical remarks by males are: - Thank you Do you want to try it out? (S1 Laptop) - Yes, it‟s great isn‟t it? (S5 Car) Females, nevertheless, tended to use much more Agreement than males in these two situations The typical remarks are: - Thanks I borrow it from my husband (S1 Laptop) - Thank you I enjoy driving it too (S5 Car) This further illustrates the viewpoint that men and women tend to view compliment response differently Males tend to use more AGREEMENT on Performance and Possession than Appearance Whereas for females, employing more AGREEMENT on Appearance and Possession than Performance There are differences between same-gender 34 and different gender in terms of the topic dimension On appearance dimension, male-male (7.76%) use AGREEMENT more than male-female (6.03%), while female-female (9.49%) employ AGREEMENT more than female-male (7.76%) This is similar to Holmes (1988), she pointed out that there is a clearly observable tendency for women to receive compliments on their appearance and to compliment each other on their appearance To be specific, 56.7% of all the compliments women received in the New Zealand data related to aspects of their appearance, and 61% of all the compliments between women related to appearance, compared to only 36% of the compliments between male Wolfson (1984) examined the compliment behavior of Americans and found that compliments on appearance were the dominant topic for women, whereas men complimented on possessions She contends that when appearance is the topic of a compliment, the addressee is hardly ever male In addition, there seems to be rather strong constraint against the giving of appearance-related compliments to higher-status males However, the same is not true for women who receive compliments on their appearance from both men and women of the same, higher, and lower status To explain such difference, some researchers‘ acknowledgements claim that men and women are biologically different and this difference may cause gender difference in language use Others claim that, since men and women are social beings, they have to act in certain ways Men learn to be men and women learn to be women They communicate with each other differently Still others suggest that gender difference in language may be due to the fact that men and women fill different roles in society Moreover, Men have more power and may be more assertive; women are subordinate but aspire quite often to a better social status and a different speech style Women therefore appear to be more conscious of uses of language They tend to use more standard and even hypercorrect language forms If a woman is heard to use some vulgar words or cursing terms, she will be abused more severely than would a man Women tend to put more effort than men into keeping a conversation going Furthermore, society has different expectations for men and women Women are closely related to child rearing and are supposed to transmit cultural values of the society, so women are conscious of the importance of acquiring more standard language forms Based on the above discussion, the statistical results show that, there existed significant differences between men and women in performing the speech act set Men and 35 women also showed distinct differences in using compliment response strategies These findings suggest that there is a significant relationship between gender and the realization patterns of this speech act set We argue that females tend to be more polite in performing the speech act set by using more polite strategies because men and women view compliments differently Men tend to interpret compliments as face threatening acts, while women tend to apply them as strategies for maintaining solidarity Janet Holmes (1995) also argues that in general women are more polite than men She states that women are more likely than men to express positive politeness and to use mitigating strategies to avoid or minimize threatening their interlocutor‘s face 36 Part 3: Conclusion Using the modified analytical framework proposed by Herbert (1986), this study aimed to find the answers to the two research questions Here are some major findings of the study Major findings The paper has interpreted the major findings of the study and tried to explain the reason why women tend to use more polite speech forms than men from social and cultural perspectives Firstly, there is a similarity between males and females Most of the subjects use APPRECIATION TONKEN “thank you” to satisfy the complimenter‘s positive face In AGREEMENT strategies, COMMENT ACCEPTANCE, COMMENT HISTORY and GIVING CREDIT are employed more than other subcategories by males and females In NO-AGREEMENT strategies, SCALE DOWN and QUESTION are used more than other subcategories In addition, most of the subjects don‘t use REQUEST INTERPRETATION Secondly, there are some differences between males and females: - Men and women show distinct difference in using compliment response strategies Male-female tends toward AGREEMENT; while male-male tend toward NOAGREEMENT In contrast, female-female are employed more AGREEMENT than female-male The data shows that there is a difference between males and females in compliment response strategies Females tend to apply bit more AGREEMENT and REQUEST INTERPRETATION than males, while males use more NO-AGREEMENT than females - On the topic dimension, male-male use AGREEMENT for appearance and performance more than for possession, while male-female use AGREEMENT for possession and performance more than for appearance However, the similarity between female-female and female-male is found that female-female and female-male use AGREEMENT for appearance, and possession more than for performance Male workers are usually a bit wary of complimenting female co-workers on their appearance in case their comments are uncomfortable or confusing, but female co-workers often enjoy talking 37 about each other's appearance and clothes Males usually compliment each other about cars, motorbikes or computers etc The findings of the study show that men and women in our paper differed in their choice of politeness strategies in responding to compliments All these differences proved that women were more polite than men although both gender were oriented towards politeness This is the answer to the second question Females give priority to solidarity and concentrate on building and maintaining the social bonds that hold communities together; for males, priority goes into power, the struggle for independence Women view certain language forms differently from men because they serve different functions For example, women view the use of compliment response as a way of showing solidarity, while men may view them as face threatening acts (FTAs) For women, certain language forms, such as compliment and compliment response can have expressive function - a way of showing solidarity For men, they may even function as face-threatening But the difference between men and women in language is not permanent Sometimes, with the development of society and the changes of cultural values, the difference may decrease Based on the above observations, and theories, which are politeness and face theories It seems to draw the conclusion that, on the whole, women tend to use more polite language forms in performing this specific speech act compliment response Implications This is a very small study wit a limited number of participants, the results of this study cannot be generalized to all British speakers But I hope this study will shed some light on the foreign language teaching and learning, so that learners could respond to compliments more appropriately, conveniently and naturally while communicating with foreigners It is agreed that, in order for ESL learners to become communicatively competent in a second language, they need both grammatical and pragmatic competence (Thomas, J 1983) However, achieving pragmatic competence may be complicated due to pragmatic transfer-using the rules governing speech events from one‘s Ll speech community when interacting with members of an L2 speech community Pragmatic 38 transfer can lead to pragmatic failure Especially, Vietnamese learners of English understand more about the ways British native speakers respond to compliments Moreover, the teacher and ESL learners know what they compliment on to avoid making the complimentee feel uncomfortable and confused The findings of this study also suggest that it is necessary for teachers of languages to take cross-gender differences into consideration when they teach communication skills in any target language Suggestions for further research This study shows its limitations in several ways Firstly, the study only investigates the compliment responses between interlocutors of the same age, equal social status and close relationships Therefore, its finding may not apply to situations where interlocutors are of different age, unequal social status and distant relationship Further studies are needed to investigate the language behavior of the subjects having different ages, unequal social status and different social relationships Secondly, the instrument DCTs is designed to ensure that all relevant information is included in sufficient detail, but there is no way to ensure that all information collected is useful and relevant This suggests that a complementary study could be conducted by collecting data through natural observations Furthermore, the subjects are British participants in workplace, it would be interesting if in future research informants were a larger number of participants or belong to a different social class to see how they assess the social factors in the situations Moreover, the situations under study were limited to some certain contexts As a result, it is impossible to make a concrete conclusion about who, males or females, are more polite This is because in other situations, the results would be perhaps quite different So further researches should cover more situations so that the result can be more accurate In addition, some of the situations under study were not realistic in English context Sit.6 is an example This is the reason making the respondents uncomfortable and misunderstood receiving the suggested compliments This suggests that researchers should design the questionnaire more carefully 39 Besides, it would be more useful to language learners if the study made a contrastive analysis on British and Vietnamese gender in using politeness in responding to compliments This would help Vietnamese language learners understand and adapt their communicative strategies when they respond to a British male or female speaker In conclusion, whatever future findings may be added to our knowledge of expressing a speech act of compliment responses, it is undoubted that the learners of any languages should study thoroughly the normal norms of that language in order to respond to compliments naturally and successfully 40 References Austin, J L (1962), How to things with words, New York: Oxford University Press Brown, P and Levinson, S (1978), `Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena‟, pp.56-311, in ed Goody, (ed), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Cordella, M., H Large and V Pardo (1995), Complimenting behavior in Australian English and Spanish speech, Multilingua, pp 14.3: 235-252 Herbert, R.K (1986a), Say “Thank you‟‟- or something American Speech, pp 7688 Herbert, R.K (1988a), Compliments and compliment responses in New Zealand, Anthropological linguistics, pp 485-508 Herbert, R K (1989), The ethnography of English compliments and compliment responses: A contrastive sketch In W Oleksy, (Ed.), Contrastive pragmatics, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Herbert, R.K (1990), Sex-based differences in compliment behavior: Language in Society, pp 19: 201-224 Holmes, J (1986), Compliments and compliment responses in New Zealand English, Anthropological Linguistics Holmes, J (1988a), Compliments and Compliment Responses in New Zealand English, Anthropological Linguistics, Vol.28, pp 485-508 10 Holmes, J (1988b), Paying compliments: a sex-preferential politeness strategy, Journal of pragmatics (12), pp 445-465 11 Holmes, J (1995), Women, Men and Politeness, London, Longman 12 Lakoff, R (1975), Language and women‟s place, London: Harper and Row 13 Johnson, D M and Roen, D H (1992), Complimenting an involvement in peer reviews: gender variation, Language in Society, pp 21.1: 27-57 14 Leech, G (1983), Principles of Pragmatics, Longman; London and New York 41 15 Manes, J And Wolfson, N (1981), The Compliment formula, In F Coumas (ed), Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech The Hague: Mouton Publishers, Pp 115132 16 Manes, J (1983), ‗Compliments: A mirror of cultural value‟ In N Wolfson and E Judd (eds), Sociolinguistics and language acquisition Rowley, MA: Newsbury House, pp 96-102 17 Pomerantz A (1978), Compliment Responses: Notes on the Co-operation of Multiple Constraints In J Schenkein (ed.) 1978 Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction New York: Academic Press, pp 79-112 18 Pridam F (2001), The Language of Conversation, London: Routledge, pp 52 19 Searle, J.R (1969), Speech Acts Cambridge University Press 20 Searle, J (1979), Expression and meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 21 Spolsky, B (2000), Sociolinguistics, Oxford University Press 22 Wan-juan Yu (2007) Pedagogical Description of Compliment-Response Exchanges in a British Context for Chinese EFL Learners MSc in Language Teaching The University of Edinburgh 23 Wolfson, N (1983a), An empirically based analysis of compliments in American English In N Wolfson, & E Judd, (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and language acquisition Rowley, MA: Newbury House 24 Wolfson N.(1984), Pretty is as pretty does: A speech act view of sex roles, Applied Linguistics, Vol.5, No.3 25 Ye, L (1995), Complimenting in mandarin Chinese Kasper, G (ed) Pragmatics of Chinese as Native and Target Language University of Hawaii, USA 26 Yule, G (1996), Pragmatics, Oxford University Press 42 Appendix A SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE Thank you for taking part! This discourse completion test is designed for my thesis about a speech act: compliment responses The purpose of this test is to explore how British native speakers of English respond to compliments In the six scenarios provided you have a particular role and receive a compliment for some reason Please write down your possible responses to the compliments you receive In any case you feel a need to have nonverbal responses, please specify it This test is entirely anonymous, and you will not be asked for any identifying information Have fun! Age:………… Gender: □ Male □ Female Occupation: …………………… Nationality……………………… Could you please read the following situations and write your answer in the blank? SIT Today when you arrive at your company, one of your female colleagues sees your new laptop She compliments you on it ―What a modern laptop!‖ What would you say in response? _ SIT Today you go to work with a stylish hair due A female colleague exclaims ―Nice haircut It suits you well‖ What would you say in response? 43 SIT When you are at work, a female colleague runs into you and exclaims ―"I've read an article you wrote last week It's fantastic"‖ What would you say in response? _ SIT Today you have presented your project to attract foreign investors After your presentation, a male colleague approaches you with a compliment ―You did an excellent job! I really enjoyed your presentation‖ What would you say in response? _ SIT You lend a male colleague your car He comes back and says to you ―I like your car It runs very well.‖ What would you say in response? _ SIT One morning, you are working in the office A male colleague notices you wearing a new suit then he says, ―I like your new suit You look so elegant‖ you say in response? _ Thank you very much! Have a nice day! What would 44 Appendix B Tables of the results Table 3.2.1: Compliment response strategies by males Compliment response types AT Agreement CA PU CH Rea Ret GC Subtotal No-agreement SD D Qual Ques NA Subtotal Request Interpretation App % 3.45 0.86 0.86 0.86 6.03 1.72 1.72 - M-f Per % 3.45 0.86 0.86 2.59 7.76 0.86 0.86 Pos % 4.31 2.59 1.72 8.62 - - - App % 3.45 0.86 0.86 0.86 0.86 0.86 7.76 - M-m Per % 2.59 1.72 0.86 0.86 0.86 0.86 7.76 - Pos % 1.72 0.86 1.72 0.86 0.86 6.03 0.86 0.86 1.72 - 45 Table 3.2.2: Compliment response strategies by females Compliment response types AT Agreement CA PU CH Rea Ret GC Subtotal No-agreement SD D Qual Ques NA Subtotal Request Interpretation App % 4.31 2.59 2.59 9.49 0.86 0.86 F-f Per % 3.45 1.72 5.17 - Pos % 4.31 0.86 0.86 1.72 0.86 8.62 - - - - App % 4.31 2.59 0.86 7.76 - F-m Per % 5.17 0.86 0.86 6.90 - Pos % 4.31 3.45 7.76 - - - 0.86 Table 3.2.3: Compliment response strategies by genders Compliment response types Agreement No agreements Request Interpretation AT CA PU CH Rea Ret GC SD D Qual Ques NA M-m % 7.75 3.44 2.58 1.72 1.72 1.72 2.58 1.72 0.86 1.72 - Total M-f % Total 11.2 4.3 3.44 21.6% 22.4% - F-f % 12.9 0.86 0.86 6.0 0.86 Total F-m % 12.1 3.44 24.1% 2.58 0.86 0.86 2.58 1.72 4.3% - Total - - 2.58 0.86 1.72 1.72 - 2.58% - - - - 20.7% 1.72 - 0.86 1.72% - 1.72% 0.86% ... hanoi College of foreign languages Department of Postgraduate Studies HOÀNG THỊ MINH ÁNH An investigation of gender differences in responding to compliments (Sự khác biệt giới cách tiếp nhận lời. .. number of studies on language and gender have been devoted to identifying, and trying to explain, differences in the speech styles of men and women And one of the main differences has been found in. .. listener to so We have just discussed face In the next part, politeness in complimenting and responding to compliments will be mentioned 1.3.3 Politeness in complimenting and responding to compliments