Compliment and Compliment Response

By Narjes Ziaei

Abstract

Compliments are a social phenomenon. In English, there are

general rules of their usage, but because of a series of social
factors, they vary according to the situation. They also consist
of frequently occurring structures/words. In this article,
compliments together with compliment responses are briefly
discussed. Then, we will try to show that a structure/word that
frequently occurs in the source language should be translated
to a structure / word occurring with a fairly similar frequency
in the target language.

Key words: compliment, compliment responses, translation

I. Introduction

n the semiotic trichotomy developed by Morris, Carnap, and Pierce

in the late 1930s, syntax deals with formal relations of signs to one
another; semantics deals with the relations of signs to what they denote;
and pragmatics with the relation of signs to their users and interpreters.
More generally, contemporary pragmatics is "the study of linguistic acts
and the contexts in which they are performed" (Stalnaker 1972); it
involves the context-dependent aspects of meaning.

The meaning of a sentence can be said to be

A structure/word that
derived from a context. The pragmatic aspect of
frequently occurs in
meaning involves the interaction between the
the source language
context in which an expression is uttered and the
should be translated
referential interpretation of elements within that
to a structure / word
expression. One of the principal goals of
occurring with a fairly
pragmatics is to characterize the features of the
similar frequency in
speech context which help determine which
the target language.
proposition is expressed by a given sentence. One
sub-domain of pragmatics is the identification and
classification of speech acts, initiated by the philosophers J.L. Austin
(1962), H.P. Grice (1967), and J. Searle (1981). A speech act is an
utterance as a functional unit in communication. This utterance has two
kinds of meaning: propositional or locutionary meaning and illocutionary
meaning. For example, in "The phone is ringing," the propositional
meaning is what it says about the ringing of a telephone. The illocutionary
meaning is what the speaker intends, for example, a request to answer
the telephone. Speech acts, also referred to as "language functions" are
numerous: requests, orders, commands, promises, etc. Austin (1962)
stressed the role of the speakers' intentions in formulating utterances.
Performative utterances, where the speaker does something rather than
merely saying something, are of particular interest to linguistic
pragmatics. This is what Austin means by "doing things with words."
Interactions and speech events are composed of ordered moves; they, as
well as complex structures such as arguments, and descriptions, are
discourse units with distinctive structures. These structural units provide
the contexts essential for grouping classes into coherent segments.
Conversational routines and adjacency pairs such as greeting, inviting,
complimenting, etc. are also important as socially constructed units of
discourses. Such socially constructed units are present in all languages;
the repertoire of units, however, differs significantly from one language to
another, in both the variety of available units and their internal structure.
Such discourse units are defined to be abstract linguistic structures which
are realized through segments; segments are in turn composed of clauses
which are related to one another in content and structure. Compliments
and compliment responses are to be investigated so as to discern how
(much) they vary in syntactic and semantic patterning and what stock of
concerns they include. Recent work in the analysis of conversational
discourse has included the study of speech acts among English-speaking
monolinguals: inviting, requesting, greeting, etc.; one such speech act is
the speech act of complimenting. A compliment is defined as "a speech act
which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to somebody other than the
speaker, usually the person addressed, for some good (possession,
characteristic, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the
hearer" (Holmes 1988). The compliment event is an adjacency pair
operation (Schegloff and Sacks 1973); it consists of two parts: the
compliment and the compliment response. In translation teaching, it is no
longer taken for granted that perfect mastery of source language's
grammar and vocabulary results into the proper rendering. A translator as
a person who wants to learn a second language must, in addition to
grammar, vocabulary, be aware of the rules of speaking (Hyms 1972;
Wolfson 1983). These rules are shared by the speakers of the language
and govern their spoken behavior; that is, they regulate when to speak in
a conversation, what to say, what topics to select to be appropriate, and
how to give, interpret, and respond to such speech acts as greetings,
apologies, compliments, etc. (Wolfson 1981).

II. General points about compliment and compliment responses

"A compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit

to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for
some good (possession, characteristics, skills, etc.) which is positively
valued by the speaker and the hearer" (Holmes 1988). The compliment
event is a two-unit turn adjancency pair operation (Schegloff and Sacks
1973) in which the first pair part and the second pair part are linked by
both temporal and relevancy conditions. In

A: That's a beautiful sweater.

B: Thanks, my sister made it for me.

B is relevant to and dependent upon A. A compliment and its response are

related to each other so that the first part predicts the second to the
extent that the absence of the second part is clearly noticeable. However,
the two have been treated independently in the literature. Wolfson and
Manes (1980) have examined the structure and content of the first on
American compliments, while Herbert (1986) and Pomerantz (1978) have
treated compliment responses.

Despite the fact that linguists have treated the first and the second pair
parts independently, complimenting and responding to compliments are
two intimately linked acts. Both function as negotiating solidarity. The
primary function of compliments in everyday conversation, according to
most analysts, is social; although they can serve a variety of functions,
their purpose is to establish, negotiate, maintain, or consolidate social
solidarity (Manes and Wolfson 1981, Holmes (1988), Herbert 1990,
Johnson and Roen 1992).

Compliments operate within the scheme of conversational postulates such

as make the hearer feel good (Lackoff 1975, Goody 1918).

Likewise, wrong translation can be avoided by equipping translation

learners with the necessary sociolinguistic information concerning the
common speech acts. One such speech act is complimenting.
Compliments are surprisingly regular (Wolfson 1983): 85% of the
compliments use only three syntactic patterns; two verbs, like and love,
account for 86% of the verbs in compliments; only five adjectivesnice,
good, beautiful, pretty, and greatconstitute two-thirds of the adjectives
used. This high degree of fixedness has strong implications for teachers,
translators and interpreters.

The analysis of compliments indicated outstanding semantic and syntactic

regularity. Almost all the compliments were semantically loaded (93.7%),
and this semantic load was found to generally be adjectival (83.5%); only
five adjectives accounted for 67.4% of all the adjectival compliments. The
syntactic regularity is also striking: only two syntactic patterns accounted
for more than two-third (78.2%) of the compliments. 12 types of
compliment responses were distinguished; three of them accounted for
43.8% of the responses. The frequent occurrence of set phrases was also
remarkable: 50.4% of all the responses were accounted for by ten
formulas.
Compliments

Wolfson and Manes, in a series of interesting articles on American

compliments (Manes 1983; Manes and Wolfson 1980; Wolfson 1981,
1983), found out that the structures of compliments are surprisingly
similar: 85% of the compliments they studied consisted of three main
syntactic patterns:

1. NP is/looks (really) ADJ

Your raincoat is really nice.

2. I (really) like/love NP

I really like your hair.

3. PRO is (really) a ADJ NP

That's a neat jacket.

The first pattern covered 53.6% of the compliments in the corpus; the
second and third accounted for 16.1% and 14.9%, respectively. Wolfson
and Manes also found that only two verbs like and love, accounted for
86% of the positively evaluative verbs. Moreover, it was found that five
positive evaluative adjectives- nice, good, beautiful, pretty, and great
accounted for two-thirds of the adjectives used, the two most common
ones being nice (22.5%) and good (19.6%).

Compliment responses

Further works, following Pomerantz (1978) have expanded the unit of

analysis to cover both the compliment and its response. (Hurbert 1990;
Holmes 1988; Johnson and Roen 1992; Olshtain (1989). In English, the
correct (preferred) response to a compliment is unanimously felt to
be thank you; the socialization advice to children (say thank you) is also
indicative of this. But Herbert (1990) found enormous variation in actual
collection of compliment responses. Drawing on the complaint by
foreigners about the difficulty of how to accept a compliment, he
attributes the difficulty to the "dual semantic-pragmatics" components of
compliments, namely 1. Assertion of positive valuation by the speaker,
and 2. Verbal gifts offered to the addressee. Pomerantz (1978) claimed
that the act of responding to a compliment is governed by two general
conditions:

1. Agree with the speaker

2. Avoid self-praise
The addressee's dilemma is how to agree with the speaker, and not to
seem to praise oneself. Herbert (1986, 1989, 1990) found 12 types of
compliments responses:

1. Appreciation tokenA verbal or nonverbal acceptance of the

compliment (e.g, thanks, thank you, [nod]).
2. Comment acceptancesingleAddressee accepts the
complimentary force and offers a relevant comment on the
appreciated topic (e.g, Yeah, it's my favorite, too).
3. Praise upgradeAddressee aacepts the compliment and asserts that
the compliment force is insufficient (e.g., Really brings out the blue
in my eyes, doesn't it?)
4. Comment historyAddressee offers a comment on the object
complimented, it shifts the force from the addressee (e.g., I bought
it for the trip to Arizona).
5. ReassignmentAddressee agrees with the compliment assertion,
but shifts the force to some third person or object (e.g., my brother
gave it to me; It really knitted itself).
6. ReturnAs with (5) except that the praise is returned to the first
speaker (e.g., So's yours).
7. Scale downaddressee disagrees with the complimentary force,
pointing to some flaw in the object or claiming that the praise is
overstated (e.g., It's really quite old).
8. Questionaddressee questions the sincerity or the appropriateness
of the compliment (e.g., Do you really think so?)
9. Disagreementaddressee asserts that the object compliment is not
worthy of praise; the first speaker's assertion is in error (e.g., I hate
it).
10. Qualificationweaker than (9). Addressee merely qualifies the
original assertion, usually with though, but, well, etc. (e.g., It's all
right, but Len's is nicer).
11. No acknowledgementaddressee gives no indication of having
heard the compliment. He either responds with an irrelevant
comment (topic shift or gives no response).
12. Request interpretationaddressee, consciously or not,
interpret the compliment as a request rather than a simple
compliment; it is not actually a compliment response (e.g., You
wanna borrow this one, too?)

Herbert reports that only one-third of American compliments are

accepted. Of course this does not invalidate the compliment behavior as
an act of offering (negotiating) solidarity since if the speaker intends to
make the hearer feel good, the addressee does the same by choosing to
avoid self-praise although he indicates that he recognizes the compliment
to be a pleaser; hence, he tries to make the speaker feel good. Moreover,
we can summarize Pomerantz's two principles into a broader
interpretation of the solidarity principle; one can confirm solidarity either
by agreeing with the speaker or avoiding self-directed praise (Herbert
1990). Return responses, anyhow, seem to fulfill the two conditions by
establishing balance between speakers by the mutual exchange.

Compliment events

Compliment events were, for ease of reference, classified into four classes
depending on their content.

1. Possession. The speaker compliments the addressee on his/her

(new) possession, such as clothing, or ornaments, etc. For example,

Che boluz-e qashangi! What a nice blouse!

Che qardanband-e qashangi- dari! What a nice necklace you have!

Sa'at-et jaleb-e. Your watch is interesting.

2. Skill. The speaker compliments the addressee on the result of

his/her skill or effort, including cooking, writing, drawing, etc. For
example,

Che qaza-ye khoshmazz-I bud! What delicious food it was!

Kheili khat-e qashang-I dari! You've got very nice handwriting.

Boluz-et ro qashang bafti. You've nicely knitted your blouse.

3. Appearance. The topic of complimenting is hair, face, or overall

appearance:

Che muhat khoshgel shode! How pretty your hair has become!

Khoshgel shodi. You've become pretty.

4. Personality. Addressee's morally positive points such as kindness,

good companionship, and general features are complimented upon:

Aqa jun cheqadr mehrabun-i! Dear grandpa, how kind you are!

Hamishe tarife shoma bude. You're always spoken well of.

III. Results
Compliments are expression of positive evaluation; a speaker wishes to
"make hearer feel good" (Goody 1978) through expressing that he (the
hearer) has a certain positive feature. This positive evaluation may be
semantici.e. through words like adjectives or verbs or syntactic
through structural markers such as what, how. For example, "You've got a
nice coat" owes its positive load to the adjective nice, while what a
fountain pen! has a marker for its positive load. Almost all the
compliments in the corpus (gathered translations from different books and
from numerous translation students) are semantically loaded (93.7%),
and this semantic load is found to generally be adjectival (83.5%). It is
mainly adjectives that provide semantic load in the four content areas.

Possession Skill Appearance Personality

Semantic load 98.1% 97.2% 97.3% 82.6%
Adjectival semantic load 98% 82.4% 66.7% 63.9%

The range of adjectives used in compliments is quite vast; adjectives

occur in the data, in a range from a single occurrence (delicate, great) to
some adjectives very frequently used (nice).

Frequency and percentage of adjectives in the four content areas

Content Possession Skill Personality Appearance Total % of % of

all all adj.
Adjectives com
com.
Qashang 201 31 2 17 251 29.9 35.9

(nice)
Shik 35 _ _ 1 36 4.3 5.1

(handsome)
Khub 22 57 26 8 113 13.5 16.1

(good)
Khoshrang 19 _ _ 1 20 2.4 2.9

(nice-
colored)
Khoshgel 16 _ _ 32 48 5.7 6.9

(pretty)
Tamiz 15 _ _ _ 16 1.9 2.3
(clean)
Khoshmaze 1 21 _ _ 22 2.6 3.1

(delicious)
Khoshsaliqe 1 2 6 _ 9 1 1.3

(tasteful)
Mehraban _ _ 5 _ _ .6 .7

(kind)
Khoshtip 1 _ _ 23 24 2.9 3.4

(smart)

Syntactic analysis

Compliment structures are found to be highly patterned as on the

semantic level. To be exact, 43% of the compliments in the corpus utilize
a single syntactic pattern:

NP (kheili/very) ADJ/ADV V.

Kote-e qashang-I dari. You've got a nice coat.

Another pattern accounts for 35.2% of the compliments:

Che/cheqadr/ajab what NP ADJ (V)!

Ajab khodkar-e qashang-i!

What a nice pen!

Compliment responses

Recent work in the analysis of conversational discourse has included the

study of compliment responses among English-speaking American
monolinguals (Pomerantz 1708), Americans, and South Africans (Herbert
1986, 1989, 1990).

On the basis of written translations, 12 types of compliment responses are

distinguished.
 1. Appreciation token. A verbal acceptance of a compliment,
acceptance not being tied to the specific semantics of the stimulus
(e.g., mersi Thanks; kheili mamnun Thank you very much)
2. Comment acceptance. Addressee accepts the complimentary force
and offers a relevant comment on the complimented topic (e.g., are,
khodam kheili khosham miyad. Yes, I'm pleased with it myself.)
3. Praise upgrade. Addressee accepts the compliment and asserts that
the complimentary force is vivid and it has always been true of
him/her (e.g., hamishe khoshgel budam. I've always been pretty.)
4. Comment history. Addressee offers a comment on the object
complimented (e.g., az Suriye baram avodrand. They've brought it
for me from Syria).
5. Reassignment. Addressee agrees with the compliment assertion, but
the complimentary force is transferred to some third person (e.g.,
kado-ye khaharam My sister give it to me) or to the object itself
(e.g., az zibaiye joml-e as The sentence is beautiful itself.)
6. Return. As with (5), except that the praise is returned to the first
speaker (e.g., khubi az khodetune. It's you who are good.)
7. Scale down. Addressee disagrees with the complimentary force,
pointing to some flaw in the object (e.g., maze ash khub nist, rang-
o-ru dare The taste is not good, it looks good)
8. Question. Addressee questions the sincerity or the appropriateness
of the compliment (e.g., jeddi? Do you mean it?)
9. Disagreement. Addressee asserts that the object complimented is
not worthy of praise (e.g., na baba Not at all)
10. Qualification. Weaker than (9); addressee qualifies the original
assertion (e.g., qashang nemidunam vali garme I don't know if it is
nice, but it is warm.)
11. No acknowledgement. Addressee either gives no response or
responds with an irrelevant comment (e.g., ki gofte kafshe mano
bepushi whoever told you to put on my shoes?
12. Request interpretation

IV. Conclusion

Sociolinguistics is a new branch of study which came into life through the
amalgamation of the sciences of sociology and linguistics. Linguistics
studies a language regardless of the person, the group, or the society
which speak the language, but sociolinguistics studies a language in
relation to people in a group or a society. In the past, for becoming a
translator, learning rules of grammar and vocabulary was considered
enough but now, in addition to grammar and vocabulary, rules of use are
also regarded to be important and essential. A specific high-frequency
structure/word n the source language should be translated to a structure
/word occurring with a fairly similar frequency in the target language.
When we encounter them to translate them appropriately, it is clear that
we need good mastery of the two sides.

For example, Iranian students in translation studies should know that

although Persian allows use of several titles before a name, only one title
is allowed in English.<br< <="" p=""></br<>

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