Compliment responses among British and Spanish university students: A contrastive study

Responding to a compliment poses a dilemma for speakers (Pomerantz, 1978) because they have to balance two diametrically conflicting conversational principles: to agree with one's conversational coparticipants and to avoid self-praise (Herbert, 1989). Far from being universal, the solution to the above dilemma hinges upon politeness principles at work within and across societies (Brown and Levinson, 1978 [1987]). In this paper the speech act of compliment responses is analysed in the light of a relative, rather than absolute, orientation towards positive or negative politeness. Using Herbert's (1989) taxonomy of compliment responses, a corpus of more than a thousand compliment responses by British and Spanish male and female undergraduates was examined. The results show the existence of cross-cultural and cross-gender similarities as well as differences between the four groups. For example, Spanish males tended to upgrade compliments ironically (a type of compliment response absent in the British data) more frequently than their female counterparts. This clearly has important implications as, unless speakers are made aware otherwise, they may bring into their intercultural encounters pre-conceived, often stereotypically negative, evaluations about the other individuals' identity. Further research in this area of language use, particularly within the field of second language acquisition, is therefore essential. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.