Compliments and Compliment Responses in Thanking among Chinese Buddhists

Abstract

In order to help the whole world people recognize the social values and cultural differences when doing business with Chinese, this paper seeks to explore one of the politeness phenomena, compliments and compliment responses, in thanking among Chinese Buddhists. The participants were 60 citizens in Quanzhou city of Fujian province, aged from 40-60. The primary data was collected by Discourse Compliment Test and classified according to Holmes’ three-way classification. The findings show that deflecting is the most favored response type with shifting praise to Buddha, which could reflect the great impact of Buddhism values on people’s life in the southeast coast of China. Further researches on this area could be explored in more cities.