A recipient-centered perception model for speech act analysis: Insights from compliments on screen

Abstract

Speech act perception has increasingly attracted attention in the field of pragmatics. However, few studies have systematically examined how multiple social factors influence compliment perceptions, and even fewer have explored the underlying mechanisms involved. To address these gaps, this study investigates how recipients from different cultures (Swiss, English, Chinese), gender, and age groups perceive compliments in tele-cinematic discourse, and proposes a recipient-centered model of compliment perception. Drawing on experiments and interviews, the study engaged 396 validly sampled viewers to evaluate three compliment scenes under both visual-only and audio-visual conditions. Results indicate that all three social variables (culture, gender and age) contribute to significant perceptual changes when transitioning from silent to audio-visual modes. However, only culture leads to significant between-group differences under both conditions. Theoretically, the study demonstrates that recipients, as perceptual subjects, are shaped by a complex interplay between perception modes (perspective, scope, cultural reference, and object selection) and perception objects (language modalities, kinesic modalities, tele-cinematic modalities, and contextual cues), resulting in varying degrees of perceptual differences across dimensions. By constructing a recipient-centered model of compliment perception, this study not only deepens our understanding of speech act perception but also contributes to the broader theoretical development of pragmatics.