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1. Introduction

1.1 Research Background 
Owing  to  the  highly  developed  technology  and  convenient  worldwide  transportation, communications  between  foreigners  and  Chinese  become  more  frequent  than  before. However,  we  gradually  find out that different countries  have different cultures.  If  we do  not know the cultural gap between foreign countries and our country, it is not easy for us to have a better  understanding  with  each  other.  More  seriously,  conflicts  are  likely  to  take  p lace. Therefore, it is a must for us to strengthen intercultural communicative competence. Compliments, as  “social  lubricants”,  are said  to  “grease the social  wheels” (Wolfson, 1983:  89).  As  we  can  see,  they  play  an  important  role  in  our  social  life.  From  1970s,  many researchers  have done some work on  compliment  language. To be  more specific, compliment language has been extensively studied in its definition, its language forms, its distribution and frequency,  as  well  as  the  reasons  for  compliments.  However,  there  are  some  limitations  in either  English  compliments  study  or  C hinese  compliments  study.  O n  one  hand,  the  existing contrast  of  C hinese  and  English  compliments  tends  to  be,  in  fact,  in  China  and  all English-speaking  countries.  It  lacks  pertinence  and  the  research  scope  is  too  broad.  Few researches focus on similarities and differences between C hinese and American compliments. On  the  other  hand,  former  studies  on  compliments  are  on  the  basis  of  Searl’s  Speech  Act Theory  and  Leech’s  Politeness  Principle  so  the  perspectives  are  the  same.  Therefore,  this thesis  aims  to  explore  and  clarify  the  similarities  and  differences  between  American compliments and Chinese compliments from a new perspective——Appraisal Theory. 
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1.2 Research Purposes
This study, by analyzing the collected corpus, tries to accomplish three purposes: First  of  all,  it  aims  at  identifying  the  ways  how  both  C hinese  and  Americans compliment  people  and  things  in  different  situations  (appearance,  ability,  possession,  etc). This  task  is  of  great  importance  because  it  is  the  first  and  basic  step  to  guide  the  latter analyses. Second,  it  aims  to  compare  and  contrast  the  C hinese  compliments  and  American English  compliments &nb本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。