Compliments and Compliment Responses of Singapore Chinese University Students

This paper examines the compliments and compliment responses of Singapore Chinese university students from naturally occurring data. Both Mainland China and Taiwan have received more attention in compliments research. Unlike China and Taiwan, Singapore is in the outer circle (Kachru 1992) of the Mandarin speaking community. Although the population of Singapore comprised of three-quarters of ethnic Chinese, Mandarin is taught in school as a second language with the medium of instruction of all other subjects being English (see Lee 2012). The different language environment and cultural bearings from the Mainland Chinese and Taiwan Chinese are reflected in this study. This study shows that unlike Taiwan college students (Wang and Tsai 2003) whose preferred compliment topic is Appearance, Singapore Chinese students prefer to compliment on Ability/Performance. Contrary to all other studies on Chinese compliment responses which show that Chinese are more modest and therefore tend to Reject compliments, this study shows that there are overall more Accept compliment responses especially between close friends. This is due to the predominant English-speaking environment in Singapore. In addition, Appreciation Token which is known to be a western response to compliments is also used more frequently by Singapore Chinese students. The linguistic features of code-switching to English and the presence of local discourse particles (from southern Chinese dialects and Malay language) are unique features of the diasporic colloquial Mandarin spoken in Singapore.