“Saying ‘thank you’ or something more than lip service”: a variational analysis of the influence of gender and social status on responses to congratulations on Chinese WeChat

2.1 Defining responses to congratulations

Compliment responses and responses to congratulations are two commonplace social activities that have been found as an effective way to enhance interpersonal relationships, though they are not always easily distinguishable from one another (Placencia and Eslami 2020). For instance, in the Chinese-speaking context, congratulations and compliments frequently co-occur in daily communication, because it is natural to compliment somebody after they have succeeded in doing something (e.g., congratulations! You are great!). In such cases, the compliments that co-occur with congratulatory remarks can usually be regarded as further supportive moves or external modifications (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989), thus making the study of responses to congratulations and compliments indistinguishable. In reality, although several previous studies have been conducted on compliment responses, it is worth briefly considering the possibility of purely paying attention to responses to congratulations.

The following paragraphs will review the relevant literature to provide a background to compare and contrast these two concepts from a speech act perspective. To be specific, 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” (Holmes 1986: 210). To put it simply, a compliment illocutionary force mainly includes praising the hearer’s appearance, possessions, character, ability and achievement (Xia et al. 2021). Congratulatory remarks build on the notion of “sympathetic pleasure” at a certain communicative event, which means the congratulator embodies a kind of joyous feeling through congratulating somebody on their success or good fortune, while simultaneously showcasing solidarity, goodwill and respect to the hearer (Holmes 1986; Vanderveken 1990). Along this vein, it is found that congratulating is an act where an interactant positively evaluates something that has been successfully done, while complimenting is an act where an interactant praises someone’s good state of being. Therefore, I propose the operational definition of congratulations in this study, which refers to a communicative act in which an interactant displays a particularly sincere, joyous attitude by giving congratulatory utterances (with default tokens “congratulations” and “bravo” in Western culture, and 恭喜gongxi, and 祝贺 zhuhe in Chinese culture) when someone succeeds in doing something, or out of good fortune (preparatory condition). This operational definition highlights two components of congratulations by considering unmarked tokens and communicative events: the expression of joyful attitudes with default tokens, and a specific communicative event that deserves congratulations. Since congratulatory remarks and compliments belong to the group of face enhancing acts in conversations where speakers reward hearers with a positive comment, both of their responses might possibly share some similarities. In this study, when a first action of a congratulatory utterance is oriented to a subsequent action of a matching second response, I treat it as a response to congratulations. Even when it co-occurs with compliments, the responses are also regarded as a set of responses to congratulations.

2.2 Previous studies on Chinese congratulatory responses

Compliments often coincide with congratulations, serving as a supportive function to enhance the congratulatory act (Taavitsainen and Jucker 2008). Indeed, congratulations as a common social phenomenon, share features with compliments, in that both of them tread a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable responses, and bring forward various forms and strategies of language use. In prior research, relative compliments and their responses have gotten more attention than responses to congratulations. This is due to the positive pleasure generated by the speaker by explicitly or implicitly showcasing praise to the hearer regarding their possessions, personality, skill, etc. (Zhu and Ren 2022) and the various exchanges that follow (e.g., acceptance, evasion, or rejection) (Chen 1993). As opposed to the research on compliments and compliment responses that has proliferated rapidly within the realm of cultural/cross-cultural studies (Alghazo et al. 2021), and the hybrid varieties of a language (Dendenne 2021), congratulatory remarks as an equally commonly-occurring polite behavior has not been paid much attention to (Qiu et al. 2023), and nor have their responses. One of the possible reasons for the limited attention that has been paid to congratulatory responses is that there is a broader assumption of simply using appreciation tokens, such as “thank you” in most Western cultures (Chen and Yang 2010) and a stereotype of evasion or rejection in Eastern culture (Chen 1993). It is therefore somewhat natural for previous studies to investigate responses to congratulations from a culturally-bound approach. However, to date, various pragmatic usages have drawn predominantly on patterns which have been seen in discursive practices in the West, and tacitly treated as culturally neutral, while patterns of language use in non-Western communities have been used as testing grounds for Western practices (Ameka and Terkourafi 2019). The realization patterns of responses to congratulations are known to vary so greatly among different communities, that what is considered acceptable or desired behavior in one community may be unacceptable or undesired in others. Since Chinese writing is character-based instead of alphabet-based, and Chinese culture differs greatly from many Western cultures, investigating responses to congratulations in Chinese can provide insight into how the testing grounds for Western cultural usage rules and their assumed motivations, can be applied to non-Western language use (Ren 2018). It is worthy to understand the complex relationship between universality and particularity in a variety of cultural and social settings. This can extend the scope of speech act theory and correct insufficient generalizations made in pragmatics, by offering a more nuanced picture of language use specific to various social variables (Schneider and Barron 2008).

More attention has been paid to compliment responses in Chinese as opposed to responses to congratulations as well. To be specific, the research of complimentary responses has been widely discussed and compared with regard to the English variations. For instance, Chen (1993) reported that American English speakers’ responses to a compliment are mostly motivated by Leech’s (1983) Agreement Maxim (e.g., as a limited range of syntactic patterns, like the acceptance of compliments), whereas Chinese speakers’ compliment responses are motivated by Leech’s (1983) Modesty Maxim (e.g., the rejection of compliments). As a baseline for the research finding (Chen 1993), Chen and Yang (2010) conducted a quasi-longitudinal study of compliment responses in Chinese, and found an overwhelming acceptance of compliments, indicating a dramatic change stemming from the influx of Western cultural influences that have occurred in China. In accordance with the claimed transition from the Modesty Maxim to the Agreement Maxim in Chinese-speaking contexts when responding to compliments, Culpeper and Pat (2021) have investigated compliment responses on Hong Kong social media, and found that acceptance strategies are overwhelmingly the most frequent type with the expression of gratitude, indicating a complex relationship between the Agreement Maxim and the Obligation Maxim (Leech 2014). Xia et al. (2021) confirmed that the acceptance of compliments was the most frequently-used response in Chinese-speaking contexts, but revealed a significant difference between the acceptance ratio in dyadic and triadic contexts. In dyadic contexts, the recipients prefer the acceptance strategy, while in triadic contexts, they are willing to respond by evasion and rejection, indicating that the Modesty Maxim still exerts an important role in Chinese culture.

As revealed by the abovementioned studies, it has been established that the acceptance strategy of compliment responses or responses to congratulations is more readily acceptable than rejections and evasions in Chinese-speaking interactions. Emery (2000) maintained that even within the same culture, performing congratulations and responding to congratulations are more complex than one may assume, as social variables can impact the way in which congratulatory remarks are received. For example, differences in language used based on gender and social status – particularly in response to a face-enhancing act – have been well documented in the existing literature, showing that men and women tend to adjust their responses depending on their interlocutor’s social status (Bibi and Sartini 2023). Most of these studies provide a variety of insights into the intricate ways in which complimentary responses are influenced by gender roles and social status (Liao and Zhang 2023). However, the available studies present a picture of the complexity without fully unpacking the nuanced variations specific to the neighboring speech act of compliment responses – responses to congratulations – which demands a more in-depth investigation.

In addition, the rapid development of computer-mediated communication yearns for more investigations on responses to congratulations online, especially for disclosing how gender and social status impact the congratulated individual’s response on social media on the basis of technological affordances (Hutchby 2001). In line with this research lacuna, the present study aims to contribute to the variational perspective (Barron and Schneider 2009), focusing on how gender and social status influence Chinese WeChat communicators’ responses to a kind congratulatory remark.

3.1 Research questions

Against the drawbacks, one general question this study raises, then, is how do macro-social factors (e.g., gender; see Barron and Schneider 2009) and micro-social factors (e.g., social status; see Brown and Levinson 1987) influence Chinese communicators’ responses to a kind congratulatory remark? To investigate the influence of gender and social status on the strategies of responding to a congratulatory remark on Chinese WeChat, this study aims to investigate the following research questions:

1. When responding to a congratulatory remark from an interlocutor of lower/higher social status, do male and female Chinese WeChat users perform acceptance strategies, evasion strategies, and rejection strategies differently?

2. If so, in what respect?

3.2 Data source

This study collected data from WeChat, one of the most popular mobile social media applications alongside WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Similar to WhatsApp, WeChat users can synchronously or asynchronously send and receive text-based or voice-based messages. In 2024, WeChat was considered the most widely and frequently used mobile social media application in China, which has leapfrogged to 1.37 billion in a survey of mobile users of social media platforms in China (Thomala 2024). Due to its user-friendly feature, interactions which included congratulatory remarks and their responses were collected from this most representative channel of Chinese social media.

Since making congratulatory remarks to a certain group of people of different gender and social status are not commonplace activities in our daily online communication, data collection of these types of interactions in the naturally occurring context is not an easy task. Therefore, in order to accurately control the target variables and collect a large scale of data in a short period, 16 women (8 female students and 8 female teachers) and 16 men (8 male students and 8 male teachers) were invited to search their WeChat for “congratulations” (祝贺zhù hè or 恭喜gōng xǐ) they received as a teacher or a student. The relationships between teachers and students are highly hierarchical in China, where teachers are endowed with a status superior to students. This relationship between teacher and student can thus be regarded as the indicators to control the variable of social status. Sixteen participants (8 male teachers and 8 female teachers) were required to collect 10 responses to their students, and the other sixteen participants (8 male students and 8 female students) were required to collect 10 responses to their teachers. 320 congratulatory responses (16 males and 16 females) were collected, and consisted of a range of 13 congratulatory encounters, as shown in Table 1.

3.3 Ethical issues

The present study consulted the recent version of ethical concerns in online research, which claims that ethical standards should be updated to apply to different kinds of online data (Sugiura et al. 2017). I contacted the participants to obtain their consent to use their responses as research objects. Additionally, the central notion of “do no harm” is applied to all the participants in this study (Barbosa and Milan 2019). All voluntarily provided their data by screenshot, additionally providing only the necessary ethnographic information on gender and social status. The data were guaranteed to be fully anonymized and did not include any sensitive topics.

3.4 Data analysis

After the responses to congratulations were collected, they were coded into different categories based on the recipients’ clear fine line between acceptable and unacceptable responses. The explicit markers indicating direct acceptance or rejection were coded as full acceptance and full rejection. For example, the mark of appreciation “thank you” is identified as an acceptable response to congratulations, and any expression that directly refers to a negation of the congratulations is identified as a complete rejection. If a response contains not only a “thank you”, but also adds an account that disassociates the congratulated individual from the congratulatory event, I categorized it as partial acceptance and partial rejection. The three types of strategies for responding to congratulations were consulted with and adapted based on the taxonomy of complimentary responses by Xia et al. (2021), and were categorized as acceptance, evasion and rejection. Some sub-strategies are presented with the coding schemes in Tables 2, 3 and 4.

The collected data were analyzed by two trained coders. The intercoder reliability test indicated strong consistency (Krippendorff’s alpha > 0.8). The two coders discussed the uncertain cases and finally reached an agreement.

4.1 Responses to congratulations to interlocutors with higher social status (H < S)

The overall distribution of responses to congratulations used by men and women when responding to congratulations from an interlocutor of higher social status is shown in Table 5.

As Table 5 shows, in the case of unequal social status, when the higher status interlocutor offers congratulations to the lower status interlocutor, both men and women tend to use acceptance strategies first (men: 87.5 %; women: 92.5 %). Men used rejection strategies secondarily (12.5 %), but never used evasion strategies. Women, on the other hand, used evasion strategies (7.5 %), but never used rejection strategies. There thus appears to be a gender difference in evasion and rejection strategies. In addition, it can be seen that the acceptance strategies of “expressing gratitude in the form of lip service” and “appreciation tokens + suggestions” were not used by men nor women. However, a chi-square test indicates that there is a significant difference in the use of “appreciation tokens + expression of positive feelings” between the two groups (p = 0.0411), which means that women prefer to use “appreciation tokens + expression of positive feelings” more than men.

Below are some examples of the interactions in which congratulations were sent to interlocutors with lower social status. Examples (1) and (2) show how congratulatory remarks were responded to using acceptance strategies by men and women respectively.

Example (1)

In Example (1), Teacher A congratulates Student A on successfully passing the PhD application. In China, the teacher – student relationship indicates a high to low social relationship. In response to a higher status interlocutor, Student A chooses to use “appreciation tokens + gratitude” (“thanks to the professor” + “I want to extend my gratitude”) to accept the congratulations and express his gratitude to Teacher A.

Example (2)

In Example (2), Teacher B congratulates Student B on her graduation. In response to the interlocutor with a higher social status, Student B first expresses her sincere thanks to her teacher by saying “thanks for your support” and then wishes Teacher B’s team good luck by saying “our team enters into a higher level.”

Example (3) below illustrates how the evasion strategy (found only in women’s responses) is used in response to congratulatory remarks by somebody of higher social status.

Example (3)

In Example (3), Teacher C congratulates Student C on finding a job. In response to the interlocutor with high social status, Student C does not directly accept the teacher’s congratulation. Instead, she deflects the teacher’s congratulation by making a statement that is irrelevant to the ongoing communicative event.

Example (4) and (5) below illustrate how the rejection strategy (found only in men’s responses) is used in response to congratulatory remarks by somebody of higher social status.

Example (4)

In Example (4), Teacher D congratulates Student D on starting a romantic relationship. In response to the interlocutor with high social status, Student D rejects Teacher D’s congratulations by saying “not yet” with the self-denigration “it is still a long way to go”.

Example (5)

In Example (5), Teacher E congratulates Student E on a good performance. In response to the interlocutor with high social status, Student E negates Teacher E’s congratulations by saying “Oops” and dissociates himself from the congratulatory event by saying “thanks to your constant guidance and help.”

4.2 Responses to congratulations to interlocutors with lower social status (H > S)

The distribution of responses to congratulations by men and women when responding to congratulations from an interlocutor of lower social status is shown in Table 6.

Table 6 presents the frequency and percentage of responses when congratulations are given from an interlocutor of lower status. The responses by both men and women show a complete preference for the use of acceptance strategies, and a lack of use of evasion and rejection strategies. As revealed, the use of “expressing gratitude in the form of lip service” accounts for the majority of acceptance strategies (men: 75 %; women: 67.5 %), followed by the use of “appreciation tokens + suggestions” (men: 15 %; women: 11.25 %). The use of “appreciation tokens + wishes” (men: 5 %; women: 6.25 %) and “appreciation tokens + expression of positive feelings” (men: 5 %; women: 15 %) are the least frequently used response strategies by both men and women. However, men used far fewer “appreciation tokens + expression of positive feelings” than women did. A chi-square test indicates that the difference between the two groups was significant (p = 0.0455).

The following examples illustrate the two groups’ responses to congratulatory remarks by interlocutors with lower social status. Examples (6) and (7) below show how congratulatory remarks were responded to using acceptance strategies by men and women respectively.

Example (6)

In Example (6), Student F congratulates Teacher F on his successful application. In response to the interlocutor with low social status, Teacher F accepts Student F’s congratulations with a “thank you” and continues to suggest that the student apply after graduation.

Example (7)

In Example (7), Student G congratulates Teacher G on her publication. In response to the interlocutor with lower social status, Teacher G expresses thanks to Student G as lip service.