Is that What You Mean? Exploratory Study of Politeness in Compliment Responses

Complimenting behavior, as a common speech act of human beings, has become an intriguing topic in linguistics and its sub-branches. Compliment responses can be seen as solutions for maintaining a balance between (1) a preference to avoid self-praise and (2) a preference to accept or agree with the compliment (Pomerantz, 1978). The present study explored compliment responses in Iranian university students according to the conversational maxim approach (Leech 1983, 2003) and the face-management approach (Brown and Levinson 1987) with a view to extending the conceptualization of self-presentation in theorizing on politeness based on a conversation corpus. The corpus used in this analysis consists of 454 compliment/response sequences collected with the assistance of university students. Under the guidance of pragmatic and sociolinguistics, CR strategies are discussed in terms of Politeness Theories and Social Distance and Social Power affect. The analysis reveals that compliment responses may dominate the Politeness Principle, and self-presentational concerns are crucial motivating factors, and face concerns need to be incorporated into the model.