Research Paper

Sex of Complimenters and Receivers

This chapter will be devoted mainly to the description of the findings, which are revealed by the data collected. Using a corpus of about 130 compliment, I will try to present a descriptive analysis of the distribution of compliments between men and women in the Marrakeshi context. The formulaic expressions as well as topics of complimenting will also be considered according to sex of participants.

The first thing that deserves attention is the fact that women in our society give and receive compliments much more frequently than men do. The data reveals that women give 62.9% of all compliments and receive 33.7% of them. Another interesting pattern that is revealed by the data is that compliments between men are relatively rare 10.7% if compared to those between women 20.7% and that men compliment women more often than they compliment other men. Complimenting appears then to be a speech behavior which occurs much more frequently in interactions involving women than men in our society. The following table illustrates clearly this finding.

Complimenter - Receiver	Number	%
Female - Female	27	20.7
Female - Male	14	10.7
Female - Child	41	31.5
Male - Male	14	10.5
Male - Female	17	13
Male - Child	17	13
Total	130	100
Compliments according to sex of participants

The table also shows that there is a clearly observable tendency for people to compliment children. 44.5% of all compliments are directed to them and most of these compliments are given by women 31.5%. Moreover, it is worthy to note that of all compliments collected none of it is given by a child.

It is obvious that there are differences between males and females complimenting behavior and these can be clearly seen through a fuller analysis of some aspects of complimenting such as topics of compliments

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