gender-based differences in compliments and compliment responses in the american comedy tv-series ugly betty sự khác biệt trong cách thức khen và tiếp nhận lời khen giữa các giới trong tiếng anh

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES BÙI THỊ ÁNH NGỌC GENDER-BASED DIFFERENCES IN COMPLIMENTS AND COMPLIMENT RESPONSES IN THE AMERICAN COMEDY TV-SERIES “UGLY BETTY” Sự khác biệt trong các

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

BÙI THỊ ÁNH NGỌC

GENDER-BASED DIFFERENCES IN COMPLIMENTS AND COMPLIMENT RESPONSES IN THE AMERICAN

COMEDY TV-SERIES “UGLY BETTY”

Sự khác biệt trong cách thức khen và tiếp nhận lời khen giữa các giới trong tiếng Anh qua bộ phim truyền hình Mỹ

“Ugly Betty”

M.A COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS

Major code: 60 22 15

Hanoi - 2011

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

BÙI THỊ ÁNH NGỌC

GENDER-BASED DIFFERENCES IN COMPLIMENTS AND COMPLIMENT RESPONSES IN THE AMERICAN

COMEDY TV-SERIES “UGLY BETTY”

Sự khác biệt trong cách thức khen và tiếp nhận lời khen giữa các giới trong tiếng Anh qua bộ phim truyền hình Mỹ

“Ugly Betty”

M.A COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS

Major code: 60 22 15 Supervisor: Kiều Thị Thu Hương, Ph.D

Hanoi - 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Declaration - i

Acknowledgements - ii

Abstract - iii

Table of contents - iv

List of abbreviations - vii

List of tables - viii

List of figures - ix

INTRODUCTION - 1

1 Statement of the problem and rationale for the study - 1

2 Aims of the study - 2

3 Research questions - 2

4 Scope of the study - 2

5 Methodology - 3

6 Significance of the study - 3

7 Organization of the study - 4

CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW - 5

1.1 SPEECH ACT THEORY - 5

1.1.1 Austin’s speech act theory - 5

1.1.2 Searle’s speech act theory - 6

1.2 POLITENESS AND FACE THEORY - 8

1.2.1 Notion of politeness and face - 8

1.2.2 Conversational-maxim view on politeness - 8

1.2.2.1 Grice’s cooperative principle - 8

1.2.2.2 Leech’s politeness principle - 9

1.2.3 Face-management view on politeness - 11

1.2.3.1 Negative and positive face - 11

1.2.3.2 Positive and negative politeness - 12

1.3 COMPLIMENTS - 13

1.3.1 The definition of compliments - 13

1.3.2 The topics of compliments - 13

1.3.3 The functions of compliments - 14

1.4 COMPLIMENT RESPONSES - 14

1.5 GENDER AND LANGUAGE - 17

1.5.1 Gender and sex - 17

1.5.2 Gender-based differences in language use - 19

1.5.2.1 Topic control - 19

1.5.2.2 Talking time - 20

1.5.2.3 Tag questions - 20

1.5.2.4 Interruption - 23

1.5.2.5 Use of silence - 24

1.5.3 Explanations for gender-based differences in language use - 24

1.6 GENDER AND POLITENESS - 27

1.7 RELATED STUDIES - 29

1.7.1 Review of the studies on compliments and compliment responses - 29

1.7.2 Review of the studies on gender-based differences in compliments and compliment responses - 33

CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY - 37

2.1 METHODOLOGY - 37

2.1.1 Material - 37

2.1.2 Data collection procedures - 37

2.1.3 Participants - 37

2.1.3.1 Female characters - 37

2.1.3.2 Male characters - 38

2.1.4 Data analysis procedures - 39

2.2 RESULTS - 39

2.2.1 The differences in compliment behavior between males and females - 39

2.2.1.1 Frequency of compliments - 39

2.2.1.2 Topics of compliments - 42

2.2.1.3 Functions of compliments - 47

2.2.2 The differences in compliment responses between males and females - 51

2.3 DISCUSSION - 56

2.3.1 Discussion of the findings on the differences in compliment behavior between males and females - 56

2.3.2 Discussion of the findings on the differences in compliment response between

males and females - 58

CONCLUSION - 61

1 Summary of the findings - 61

2 Implications - 62

2.1 Intercultural communication - 62

2.2 Pedagogical implications - 63

3 Limitations of the study - 65

4 Suggestions for further research - 65

REFERENCES - 67 APPENDIX

Compliments and compliment responses in the American comedy TV-series “Ugly Betty” (Episodes 1-10, Season 1) - I

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Statement of the problem and rationale for the study

An effective language user is competent in not only linguistics but also pragmatics As Yule (1996) put it, “nothing in the use of the linguistic forms is inaccurate, but getting the pragmatics wrong might be offensive” (p 5-6) To

be able to use a target language appropriately in terms of pragmatic competence, language users should employ a variety of speech acts Complimenting is one of them

Compliments not only express sincere admiration of positive qualities, but they also replace greetings, thanks or apologies, and minimize face-threatening acts (henceforth FTAs), such as criticism, scolding, or requests (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Holmes, 1988a; Wolfson, 1983, 1989) Complimenting is a tool of establishing friendship that creates ties of solidarity in American culture It is also an important social strategy that functions as an opener for a conversation, allowing meaningful social interactions to follow Americans pay compliments

so frequently that neglecting to do so can even be interpreted as a sign of disapproval (Manes, 1983; Wolfson, 1989; Wolfson & Manes, 1980) and a wrong use of compliments may cause embarrassment and offense (Dunham, 1992; Holmes & Brown, 1987)

Each culture requires various kinds of speech act behavior Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) found that “culturally colored interactional styles create culturally determined expectations and interpretative strategies, and can lead to breakdowns in intercultural and interethnic communication” (p 30) In other words, when people from different cultures interact, breakdowns in communication may happen due to signaling different speech act strategies that reflect the culture‟s distinctive interactional style Complimenting is a particularly suitable speech act to investigate because it acts as a window through which we can view what is valued in a particular culture Thus, it is essential for Vietnamese learners of English to know how to give appropriate compliments and responses in English

Complimenting is inevitably affected by social factors including gender According to Tannen (1990), gender differences are parallel to cross-cultural differences Therefore, it is worthwhile to study the interactions between men and women, men and men, or women and women exchanging compliments and responses

All those reasons stimulate the researcher to conduct a study on gender-based differences in compliments and compliment responses in English conversations through the American Comedy TV-series “Ugly Betty” The people in the TV series are not real people, but the actors are chosen to match the real ones in

daily life What can be assumed is that the data would bare resemblance to real life language Hopefully, the study will make a contribution to the field which it

is envisioned and fill the gaps in previous research

1.2 Aims of the study

First of all, the study sets out to investigate the gender-based differences in compliment behavior including the frequency of compliments, compliment topics and the functions of compliments Secondly, the differences between males and females in compliments response strategies are explored The findings will pave the way for several pedagogical implications and intercultural communication

1.3 Research questions

The research seeks the answers to the following research questions:

Research question 1: What are the differences in compliment behavior between males and females?

Research question 2: What are the differences in compliment responses between males and females?

1.4 Scope of the study

There are four seasons in this TV-series with the total of 85 episodes However, due to the size and limitation of a preliminary research, the dialogues in the episodes one to ten in the first season are used with the development of the story Every episode takes about 40 minutes Totally, this study will analyze ten episodes of around 400 minutes

The compliments among 18 characters balanced in gender, 9 females and 9 males, are chosen Some compliments are excluded from the present study: compliments to a place or an object that does not belong to interactants, compliments to speakers themselves or to a group of people, compliments from

a group to a particular thing or a special person

Furthermore, a compliment may be sincere or insincere Mills (2003) stated

The hearer might consider that the speaker is being insincere and is only complimenting because he/she wants something – i.e that it is serving some longer term goal; or it might be interpreted as suggesting that the person does not look good at all, but the speaker is being kind (p 220)

Also, compliments can have an ironic meaning (Holmes, 1995, p 119) For instance, if the interlocutors are enemies, the compliments between them have ironic meanings Within the scope of an M.A thesis, only sincere compliments are analyzed

1.5 Methodology

Quantitative and qualitative methods are both used in this paper with priorities

given to the quantitative In other words, all the conclusions and considerations are based on the analysis of the empirical studies and statistics processed on Stata 10, a software program commonly used in social sciences In addition,

such methods as descriptive, analytic, comparative and contrastive are also

utilized to describe and analyze, to compare and contrast the database so as to find out gender-based differences in compliments‟ frequency, topics and functions and types of compliment response strategies The outputs of data-processing are carefully investigated and those, whose significance of chi-square results is below 0.05, i.e they are statistically worth noting, are selected and taken into further consideration

2 RESULTS

2.1 The differences in compliment behavior between males and females

2.1.1 Frequency of compliments

According to Holmes (1988b), “a compliment is a speech act which explicitly

or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the

person addressed, for some „good‟ (possession, characteristic, skill, etc.) which

is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer” (p 446)

In this study, 167 valid compliments are classified in two groups: compliments

to somebody who is present and compliments to somebody who is absent The results revealed that both females and males tended to compliment the ones who were present, because the purpose of compliments is to express respect for the hearer and the speaker also wants to get a response, whereas people who are not present cannot give responses

In comparison with males, females seemed to compliment ones who were absent more than males (p = 0.005) Females complimented this type of addressees in 30.68% and males did it in 12.66% Because males are more powerful than females, they usually use the voice of commands and directives

to express their feelings (Coates, 2004), which make them require more responses For females, they usually compliment with personalized forms (Herbert, 1998) and just express their feelings, so they will not necessarily receive any responses

 Frequency of compliments from the four level perspectives:

Table 1: The number of compliments in the overall episodes

The results also revealed that there was a significant difference in compliments

by gender of addressee (χ2 = 20.1317, p < 0.001) Females received far more compliments than males (62.28% as opposed to 37.72%) Besides, it should be noted that men complimented women far more often than they complimented other men (χ2 = 20.3103, p < 0.001)

2.1.2 Topics of compliments

Regarding the topics of compliments, the present study classified them into four types based on Herbert (1998)‟s research: appearance, possession, performance or skill or ability, and personality

For those ones which do not belong to the above four categories or maybe have

mixed topics, the study classified them into “Others”

Table 3: Interaction between compliment topic and gender of participants

24 (58.54)

16 (72.73)

The results recorded in Table 3 also reveal the male preference for complimenting women on performance, ability or skill More than one-half (54.39%) of all the compliments given by males to females fell into this category

A factor contributing to the statistically significant gender differences is that men did give and receive compliments on their appearance (Table 4)

Table 4: Compliments on Appearance

It is interesting to note that men gave more compliments on appearance than women (χ2 = 3.8911, p < 0.05) Male – female interactions complimenting on appearance took the first place (26.32%), female – female 19.15%, male – male 13.64%, female – male 2.44% This is different from Holmes‟ (1988a) result: female – female interactions complimenting on appearance accounted for the highest percentage, 61% of the time, male - female 47%, female - male 40% and male - male, 36% (p 455)

In respect of the topics of Possession and Personality, the difference in the frequency of occurrence was not statistically significant (p > 0.05)

2.1.3 Functions of compliments

Every utterance has an intention, so does a compliment The functions of compliments analyzed in this study were classified into eight groups (1-8) based on the previous research and one added group (9)

(1) To express admiration or approval of someone‟s work/appearance/taste (Herbert, 1998)

(2) To establish friendship that creates ties of solidarity (Wolfson, 1989) (3) To replace greetings, gratitude, congratulations, thanks, or apologies (Wolfson, 1989)

(5) To soften the tight atmosphere and minimize FTAs such as criticism, scolding, or requests (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Holmes, 1988b, and Wolfson,

(9) To encourage others

The results showed that, for females, the highest portion in their compliments was the function of making solidarity (31.82%), and the second place was admiration (29.55%) This means that females usually tended to show their solidarity and admiration as part of their politeness

With regard to males, the situation was reversed Male compliments more often offered admiration, 25.32% of the time and less offered solidarity, 20.25% This finding showed the similarity with Herbert‟s (1989)

2.2 The differences in compliment responses between males and females

In the total of 167 compliments, 130 compliments were given to someone present Thus, the responses to these 130 compliments were analyzed

Compliment responses were classified mainly according to Herbert (1989)‟s perspective Slightly different from Herbert‟s categorizations, the responses in this study were categorized into: Agreement, Non-agreement and Combination The responses which combined more than one strategy were labeled as Combination

Table 5: Compliment response interaction data

Table 6: ACCEPTANCE AGREEMENT responses

aχ2 = 13.3092, p = 0.000

While AGREEMENT responses accounted for 35.38% of the data, the subcategory of agreement, i.e., ACCEPTANCE (APPRECIATION TOKEN, COMMENT ACCEPTANCE, and UPGRADE) occurred in 32.31% of the interactions It was not the case that these ACCEPTANCE responses were equally distributed across interaction types In particular, compliments offered

by males were more likely to be accepted than compliments offered by females (p < 0.001), especially if offered to a female addressee It was not the case that females simply accepted more compliments than males: compare the roughly 42.11% acceptance rate in male - male interactions with the 19.35% acceptance rate in female - female interactions (See Table 5) It was the gender of the person offering the compliment that served as a better predictor of compliment acceptance

Table 7: APPRECIATION TOKEN responses

Table 8: AGREEMENT (ACCEPTANCE and NON-ACCEPTANCE)

33/69 (47.83%)

c By gender of

aχ2 = 10.0021, p = 0.019

bχ2 = 9.9553, p = 0.002; cχ2 = 0.7834, p = 0.376

Considering simultaneously the two broad subcategories of AGREEMENT (i.e., Acceptance and Non-acceptance), in Table 8, we can see that the interaction type in which there was the greatest likelihood of AGREEMENT is male – female (48%) interactions, which as noted earlier, is the preferred interaction type for ACCEPTANCE responses Male compliments were generally more likely to meet with AGREEMENT responses (See Table 8(b)) Agreements occurred in slightly more than one-third (35.38%) of the compliment exchanges The remaining two-thirds were comprised of the large category of NON-AGREEMENT (62.31%), in which the compliment recipient avoided agreeing with the content of the compliment, and the smaller category

10/19 (52.63%)

25/50 (50%)

a

χ2 = 10.7322, p = 0.013

According to the table above, the least likely scenario for NON-AGREEMENT occurred in the male – female interaction type, whereas, female compliments, especially those addressed to males were more likely to meet with this sort of NON-AGREEMENT

Regarding to the subtype of non-agreement, i.e., NO ACKNOWLEDGMENT responses, it is surprising that topic shift and silence accounted for 75.31% of NON-AGREEMENT responses There was a significant difference between the genders in choice of this strategy (p = 0.001) (See Table 10)

While this category accounted for only 3.13% of Holmes‟ (1988b) data and 5.08% of Herbert‟s (1989) Binghamton corpus, it occurred in a high frequency (46.15%) in the present study Holmes (1988b) found a slightly stronger preference for these responses from men (5.3%) than women (2.4%) Herbert (1989) also concluded that this response type was most common in male – male interactions In contrast, analyzing the present data according to gender of participants, it can be seen that this strategy was most common in female – male interactions and that there was a significantly greater likelihood of this response type from male addressees (Table 10(c))