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The present study aims to contrast the performance of Congratulate by advanced learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) and Chinese native speakers. Adopting a bottom‐up procedure, it discovers three types of Congratulate structures and seven categories of strategies used by both native speakers and advanced CFL learners. It also reveals that while social distance and power exert influence on the performance of Congratulate in both groups, significant differences exist in the overall distribution of these structures and categories of strategies. In addition, it discusses salient problems concerning the appropriateness of advanced CFL learners’ production with the aid of corpus‐based analysis and written interview. By supplementing a discourse completion test–based contrastive analysis with the two ancillary analyses, the study has a methodological implication for future empirical research in second language pragmatics.

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