Azadeh Hassani
Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran
Complimenting, as one of the most effective speech acts in socializing and establishing rapport, has enjoyed considerable attention in the literature. However, most studies in this realm have focused on face-to-face conversations and elicited data, while they have neglected Internet-mediated communication contexts. The purpose of this study is to investigate the main compliment/compliment response patterns used by female Persian speakers communicating via a mobile messaging application like Telegram in an Iranian context. To this end, a corpus of over 190 compliment exchanges was analyzed to explore syntactic patterns characterizing compliments and functional categories of compliment responses. The subcorpus of compliments was structurally analyzed according to Manes and Wolfson (1981). In terms of classification of compliment responses, the corresponding subcorpus was analyzed using Holmes’ taxonomy (1988). The analyses revealed that female Persian speakers preferred to use abbreviated statements to compliment their counterparts in online environment. However, the use of first person pronoun was rare among complimenters which was an evidence of adhering to modesty as a socially accepted norm in Iranian culture. In responding to compliments, Accept strategies were the most frequently used ones by females. The widespread use of emoticons is an evidence for females’ tendency to communicate their mood more clearly. The results of the present study may be helpful in extending the knowledge of sociolinguistic rules of Persian language to prevent communication breakdowns.
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Second International Conference on Current Issues of Languages, Dialects and Linguistics (WWW.TLLL.IR), 1-2 February 2018, Ahwaz.
