Date

2018-07-06

Author

Dörtkulak, Funda
Işık Güler, Hale

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In interpersonal face-to face communication, compliments have historically been regarded as expressive speech acts which maintain and/or support the addressee’s positive face. However, social networking sites have become a new mode of communication where much information transfer is through photo-initiated prompts. Compliments and responses to them in such computer mediated interaction are very commonly used and being studied more and more (Kuntjara, 2013; Maíz-Arévalo, 2012, 2013; Maiz-Arevalo & Garcia-Gomez, 2013; Matley, 2017; Placencia & Lower, 2013). The compliment speech act in this domain of use has, thus, significantly evolved in both function and structure, revealing unique strategies of response and the im/politeness it involves and subsumes for interlocutors. Starting with a discussion surrounding the need for a re-definition of compliments, this corpus-driven study aims at challenging the misconceptions and overgeneralizations about compliments and responses to them, with the utilization of a comparative corpus of 2000 Facebook compliments on photo comments, evenly compiled from women and men, and from Turkish and American English. Based on the results of the tagged discourse data (via Nvivo 11) and analyses of the quantitative results (using SPSS 22.0), this study depicts a cross-cultural and gender-based comparison of compliments and compliment responses based on structural, topical and functional properties of use. The findings indicate that the claimed formulaicity of compliments (Manes & Wolfson, 1981) and universal patterns of compliment responses are not strictly valid for Turkish, due to the structural variation it exhibits and the unique cultural features embedded in the contextualized use of this speech act. On the other hand, Turkish and American English display similarity in topical characteristics with some minor cross-cultural and intracultural (gender-based) differences. Although the functions of compliments are mostly alike, some prominent unique cultural elements such as the wish ‘maşallah’ to keep away from the evil eye and a noteworthy number of sarcastic compliments were identified. Contrary to the previous definition of compliments (as attributing the positive value to someone “other than the speaker” (Holmes, 1988)), in a considerable number of data samples, the focus of facework was on self-face support rather than other face-maintenance. The analysis of additional system of choices available (e.g. emoticons, Like buttons, etc.) to Facebook users and their combined use with verbal responses revealed that these new choices were predominantly preferred by complimentees. In this regard, the “Like” button will be discussed as a mild appreciation token in terms of im/politeness value. 25 All in all, new modes of communication brought about new aims, new strategies and multimodality in social interactions. Therefore, the (im)politeness value of this new language in use is a fruitful area to study and it shapes the main focus of this study.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/77447

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar