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The Role of Gender in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese Compliments

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Researching Sociopragmatic Variability

Abstract

A great number of pragmatics studies have been carried out to explore cross-or intercultural variations at the pragmatic level. Intracultural or intralingual research has received relatively little attention. To bridge the gap in the literature, variational pragmatics (henceforth VP) has been recently established (Barron and Schneider 2009, Schneider and Barron 2008) to investigate the influence of macrosocial factors on pragmatic conventions within the same language. To date, the majority of VP studies have focused on the varieties of Indo-European pluricentric languages, for example English, Spanish, German and French. Non-Indo-European languages including Chinese (Bresnahan et al. 1999, Lin et al. 2012, Ren this volume, Ren et al. 2013) and Japanese have been comparatively underexplored. The present study aimed to expand the scope of the VP literature by examining the role of gender in the ways that compliments are given in two varieties of Chinese, that is, Taiwan and Mainland Chinese.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Feng Chia University, Taiwan

    Chih-Ying Lin

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  1. Chih-Ying Lin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of the West of England, UK

    Kate Beeching

  2. University of Bristol, UK

    Helen Woodfield

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© 2015 Chih-Ying Lin

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Lin, CY. (2015). The Role of Gender in Taiwan and Mainland Chinese Compliments. In: Beeching, K., Woodfield, H. (eds) Researching Sociopragmatic Variability. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373953_3

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