“Why are you speaking Chinese so well?”: a pragmatic study of compliments on foreigners’ Chinese proficiency

Compliments on the Chinese proficiency of L2 learners has been reported to be ambivalent, often triggering negative evaluations. In the present study, we aim to explore the pragmatic reasons behind this ambivalence. First, we examine an online corpus of etic comments on Chinese L2-related complimenting, alongside a corpus of interviews conducted with expert L2 speakers of Chinese. Through this step, we hope to systematically capture how learners of Chinese evaluate compliments on their L2. Second, we analyse a corpus of interactions featuring Chinese L2-related compliments, in order to capture the realisation patterns of such compliments in real-life settings. We use the outcomes of this second step to interpret the results of our first step. Our findings show that Chinese L2-related compliments may trigger irritations even when they are positively or neutrally valenced, and that they trigger negative evaluations whenever they are associated with flattery. We also found that a major reason behind this negative evaluative tendency is that Chinese L2-related compliments are often ritual, implying that what appears to be ‘flattery’ from an etic perspective is conventional ritual complimenting from an emic viewpoint.