Research Paper

Compliment Responses

Compliment response is a verbal acknowledgement that the recipient of the compliment heard and reacted to the compliment. This reaction may differ from one person to another or,more importantly , from one society to another depending on a variety of contextual and cultural factors. In this section,I shall be considering compliment responses, as they are important factors in complimenting behavior as a whole.

Many studies have tried to provide a detailed account of compliment responses.One of these studies is by Pomerantz (1978). Pomerantz ( cited in Nelson , Al Batal, and Echols , 1996) points out that compliment responses pose a dilemma for the recipient in that accepting the compliment and agreeing with the speaker may be seen as self-praise, while at the same time it is impolite to disagree and reject the compliment outright. Pomerantz goes on to argue that compliment responses could be seen as solutions to this dilemma. Examination of her data on American compliment responses indicates that there are four categories of responses: acceptances, agreements, rejections, disagreements; with the last two categories accounting for the majority of responses. Pomerantz suggests that self-praise avoidance account for the frequency of rejections and disagreements in compliment responses.

In contrast to this, Holmes (1988) argues that many of the compliment responses, which Pomerantz considered to be "disagreements and rejections" seem to express qualified acceptance rather than outright rejection. Holmes's findings suggest that this avoidance strategy of changing topic or focus is most likely to be used if a compliment is experienced as embarrassing. Her analysis of the distribution of New Zealand compliment responses reveals that the most common response to a compliment is to accept it , with the next most frequent response being to deflect the credit; it is relatively rarely that New Zealanders overtly reject compliments.

In her study of complimenting behavior in the united States, Manes (1983) states that Americans, in responding to compliments, use a number of strategies in order to avoid or minimize the conflict indicated by Pomerantz. The most common is a simple "thank you" which accepts the compliment without explicitly agreeing with its content. Another very frequent strategy is to downgrade the compliment by referring to another characteristic of the object. By so doing, the recipient mitigates the force of the compliment without overtly disagreeing with the speaker and also without praising her/himself. Wolfson similarly notes that one solution to the dilemma is to deny or play down the worth of the thing complimented. She explains:

In response to a compliment on the beauty of a house, therefore, American might say, "well, we would have liked to have a bigger one" or "we wish the neighborhood were quitter", but Americans would be very unlikely to suggest that the speaker was wrong and that the house was not beautiful at all.
Wolfson(1989a); cited in Nelson , Al Batal , and Echols(1996:414).

A research paper submitted to the department of English of Cadi Ayyad University
in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Licence-es-Letters in English
Year : 1998 - 1999 / Major : Linguistics / Seminar Title :Pragmatics
Supervisor : Dr. GAJJOUT Hassan