Arabic and English Compliment Responses: Potential for Pragmatic Failure

This study investigated similarities and differences between Syrian and American compliment responses Interviews with Americans yielded 87 compliment/compliment response sequences and interviews with Syrians resulted in 52 sequences Americans were interviewed in English and Syrians in Arabic Data co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied linguistics 1996-12, Vol.17 (4), p.411-432
Main Authors: NELSON, GAYLEL, AL-BATAL, MAHMOUD, ECHOLS, ERIN
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Arabic
Audiotape Recordings
Compliments (Language)
Contrastive Linguistics
Descriptive studies and applied theories
English (Second Language)
Interviews
Linguistics
Pragmatics
Second Language Instruction
Second Language Learning
Semantics and pragmatics
Sex
Speech Acts
Uncommonly Taught Languages
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Summary:This study investigated similarities and differences between Syrian and American compliment responses Interviews with Americans yielded 87 compliment/compliment response sequences and interviews with Syrians resulted in 52 sequences Americans were interviewed in English and Syrians in Arabic Data consisted of demographic information and transcriptions of the sequences The entire set of data was examined recursively This examination suggested three broad categories (acceptances, mitigations, and rejections) and subcategones Two trained raters coded each of the English and Arabic compliment responses as belonging to one of the categories Intercoder reliability for the American data was 92 per cent and 88 per cent for the Syrian data Of the American compliment responses, 50 per cent were coded as acceptances, 45 per cent as mitigations, and 3 per cent as rejections Of the Syrian compltment responses, 67 per cent were coded as acceptances, 33 per cent as mitigations, and 0 per cent as rejections Results suggest that both Syrians and Americans are more likely to either accept or mitigate the force of the compliment than to reject it Both groups employed similar response types (e g agreeing utterances, compliment returns, and deflecting or qualifying comments), however, they also differed in their responses US recipients were much more likely than the Syrians to use appreciation tokens and a preferred Syrian response, acceptance + formula, does not appear in the US data at all
ISSN:0142-6001
1477-450X
DOI:10.1093/applin/17.4.411