This research investigates sociolinguistic variations in the compliment event in Kunming Chinese. The goal is to see how the use of the speech event varies with respondents' age, gender, and educational level.;Four types of data were collected in Kunming from 185 informants. These were written discourse completion task (DCT) data, oral DCT data, observational notebook data, and interview data. Three research questions are addressed: (1) Do people of different age groups give and respond to compliments differently? If so, how? (2) Do men and women give and respond to compliments differently? If so, how? (3) Does educational level make a difference in the way people give and respond to compliments? If so, how?;Dependent variables investigated include the semantic formulas that make up the compliments and responses to compliments, the syntactic patterns and personal focuses of compliments, and the selection of positive semantic carriers and intensifiers in compliments.;Results show that in spite of some similarities among the informants, the three social variables do trigger some systematic variations. Specifically, the male respondent group and the younger respondent group tend to be implicit and non-complimentary in their compliments while the female group as well as the older group give more explanations/justifications with their compliments. The effect of the social variables also shows up in the respondents' choice of positive semantic carriers and intensifiers. In responses to compliments, while the expression of Appreciation is predominantly used by female, younger, college-educated respondents, thus showing their innovative spirit, younger, college-educated respondents are also more untraditional in that they accept compliments more readily than other respondents do and disagree less with their interlocutors. Some changes in progress are identified and accounted for.;This study widens the scope of current variation theory in sociolinguistics by providing first-hand pragmatic evidence from a non-western speech community. It also uncovers some language/dialect/culture-specific politeness issues that need to be addressed by any politeness theory. Methodologically, it provides invaluable quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate the validity of the different data-gathering methods used in the present study.
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