A Contrastive Study of Compliment Responses among Korean and Dutch University Students:Pragmatic Transfer in Focus

A Contrastive Study of Compliment Responses among Korean and Dutch University Students:Pragmatic Transfer in Focus

This study investigates the similarities and differences among Dutch and Korean university students in how they operate compliment responses (CRs) when they speak in English. It also analyzes the pragmatic transfer of each group by comparing the data with those from Shin (2015), which investigates CR patterns of their native languages. The data was collected through a discourse completion task (DCT) written in English, designed with four different situations. The results reveals that the Korean respondents represent a greater tendency to evade and reject a compliment and they are more sensitive to a person who gives them a compliment than the content of a compliment, itself. On the other hand, the Dutch respondents tend to accept a compliment and pay more attention to the content of a compliment, itself and the distance between the speakers. Moreover, the Korean students show relatively more pragmatic transfer at the macro level, while the Dutch students make clearer pragmatic transfer at the micro level. The difference is presumed to be derived from the different level of English proficiency of the two groups. The findings prove that compliments can be interpreted and used in different ways even when they use the same language. Thus, this study provides some evidence that millions of people work in global settings and speak a common language, but they still view things from their own cultural perspectives and communicate in their own cultural patterns and routines.