Compliments And Compliment Responses

This book analyzes compliments and compliment responses in naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in German. Using Conversation Analytic methodology, it views complimenting and responding to compliments as social actions which are co-produced and negotiated among interactants. This study is the first to analyze the entire complimenting sequence within the larger interactional context, thereby demonstrating the interconnectedness of sequence organization, turn-design, and (varying) function(s) of a turn. In this regard, the present study makes a novel contribution to the study of talk-in-interaction beyond German. The book adds to existing work on interaction and grammar by closely analyzing the functions of linguistic resources used to design compliment turns and compliment responses. Here, the study extends previous Conversation Analytic work on person reference by including an analysis of inanimate object reference. Lastly, the book discusses the use and function of various particles and demonstrates how speaker alignments and misalignments are accomplished through various grammatical forms.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the pragmatics of social media, i.e. of digitally mediated and Internet-based platforms which are interactively used to share and edit self- and other-generated textual and audio-visual messages. Its five parts offer state-of-the-art reviews and critical evaluations in the light of on-going developments: Part I The Nature of Social Media sets up the conceptual groundwork as it explores key concept such as social media, participation, privacy/publicness. Part II Social Media Platforms focuses on the pragmatics of single platforms such as YouTube, Facebook. Part III Social Media and Discourse covers the micro-and macro-level organization of social media discourse, while Part IV Social Media and Identity reveals the multifarious ways in which users collectively (re-)construct aspects of their identities. Part V Social Media and Functions/Speech Acts surveys pragmatic studies on speech act functions such as disagreeing, complimenting, requesting. Each contribution provides a state-of-the-art review together with a critical evaluation of the existing research.

This book analyzes compliments and compliment responses in naturally occurring talk-in-interaction in German. Using Conversation Analytic methodology, it views complimenting and responding to compliments as social actions which are co-produced and negotiated among interactants. This study is the first to analyze the entire complimenting sequence within the larger interactional context, thereby demonstrating the interconnectedness of sequence organization, turn-design, and (varying) function(s) of a turn. In this regard, the present study makes a novel contribution to the study of talk-in-interaction beyond German. The book adds to existing work on interaction and grammar by closely analyzing the functions of linguistic resources used to design compliment turns and compliment responses. Here, the study extends previous Conversation Analytic work on person reference by including an analysis of inanimate object reference. Lastly, the book discusses the use and function of various particles and demonstrates how speaker alignments and misalignments are accomplished through various grammatical forms.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0 (B), Free University of Berlin (Institute for English Philology), course: Second Language Aquisition, language: English, abstract: In most speech communities, the speech act of complimenting is a well established politeness strategy. While the giving of and responding to compliments can be regarded as rather universal across different languages and cultures, the form, frequency and function of compliments and compliment responses significantly varies. In the following chapters, I would like to compare English compliment responses to realizations of the same speech act in Chinese and German. Since the 1970s, sociolinguists have turned towards research on communicative competence, thereby focussing on native speaker’s performance of speech acts (e.g. compliments, apologies, requests, complaints etc.). In the last three decades, the speech event of complimenting and compliment responding has been one of the major areas on which sociolinguistic research has focussed on. There are extens ive studies on this respective speech act in American English (e.g. Pomerantz 1978, Manes and Wolfson 1980) as well as comparative cross-cultural research on complimenting behavior, examining the differences in speech act realization between variants of English (American /Irish , e.g. Schneider 1999; American /South African, e.g. Herbert 1989), and between English and other languages (Chinese, e.g. Chen 1993; German, e.g. Golato 2002). These studies of communicative competence make apparent that communicating effectively and efficiently in a language requires more than just linguistic knowledge; the ability to use this linguistic knowledge appropriately in the given sociocultural context is also essential. Learners with insufficient pragmatic knowledge frequently transfer patterns from their native language into the foreign language. Second language teaching profits from studies in communicative competence because it provides teachers with information on realization strategies concerning certain speech acts in different languages.

The present volume focuses on complimenting behavior, including the awarding of (self-)praise, as manifested on social media. These commonplace activities have been found to fulfil a wide range of functions in face-to-face interaction, discoursal and relational amongst others. However, even though the giving of compliments and praise has become a pervasive practice in online environments, it remains a largely underexplored field of study within pragmatics. Self-praise is an activity that appears at the present time to be rapidly gaining ground online, and the various functions it performs clearly also need further investigation. The different contributions to this ground-breaking volume – 12 in total – aim to address this gap in research by exploring and shedding light on a number of aspects of these phenomena in a range of languages and language varieties. New socio-digital contexts are examined, supported in some cases by social networking sites not previously studied in complimenting behavior research. These include Facebook, Instagram, Renren, Twitter, as well as web forums, message boards and live text commentary.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Trier, language: English, abstract: The aim of this theoretical paper is to show differences of women and men in complimenting and to explain intervening variables in the gender-specific compliment behaviour. Even if compliments are two-unit turns, the term paper will, due to space limitations, only focus on selected aspects of complimenting, which will be distribution, topics and patterns, and leave out compliment responses. The chosen aspects are the most significant and representative to show differences in and influences on male and female compliment behaviour. The study of the influence of gender on complimenting is of interest since it provides insights into the complex differences of language use of men and women. It also provides interesting facts about sex-related values and the role of society for gender-specific differences. The term paper will be mainly based on the findings of three authors and the corresponding corpora: Janet Holmes and her New Zealand corpus, Robert Herbert and his American English data as well as Nessa Wolfson and her American English findings. All compliments were collected by the researchers and their students, predominantly within their community, through an ethnographic method in either New Zealand or the United States of America. The first part of the work will provide an explanation of compliments. A general definition will be given, as well as some interesting features will be mentioned briefly. Afterwards, the basic functions of compliments will be explained. The second part will focus on the influence of gender on complimenting. First, the unequal distribution of compliments will be discussed. Second, the sex-related differences in the choice of topics will be dealt with and finally the gender-based preferences for patterns will be explained.

This volume deals with a variety of pragmatic issues involved in cross-language and interlanguage studies as well as second-language acquisition and cross-cultural studies. Part I contains papers dealing with general issues stemming from contrastive work, for example, the question of tertium comparationis and its place in the development of contrastive studies as well as the applicability of generalizations proposed by speech-act theorists in contrasting concrete languages and cultures. The second part tackles a number of pragmatic issues involved in second-language learners' written productions, classroom discourse, as well as more general questions pertaining to pragmatic errors and learners' interlanguage. An Index of terms and an Index of names complete the volume.