Article published in:
Language and Dialogue
Vol. 10:2 (2020) ► pp. 194–214

Compliment responses in Icelandic

| University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Compliment responses are speech acts assumed to mirror cultural appropriateness. In this sense, a review of responses to compliments offers cues about the ways in which speakers react to dialogic strategies of politeness. In order to examine how Icelanders react to compliments, an Elicitation Experiment (EE) was designed to evoke natural responses. It consisted in asking a group of 81 Icelandic informants (46 female, 35 male) to read tongue-twisters in Dutch and Spanish during a set of interviews. Informants were complimented based on their performance and their responses were recorded. Based on 162 exchange tokens, it is possible to conclude that not agreeing to compliments is the most common way of reacting to compliments in Iceland.
Keywords: compliments, Icelandic, politeness, agreement, appropriateness, tongue-twisters
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Research questions and methodology
    • 3.1Elicitation experiment
      • 3.1.1Participants
      • 3.1.2Instruments
      • 3.1.3Data collection
      • 3.1.4Data analysis
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 04 September 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00066.gon
References
Adachi, Chie
2011 Sociolinguistic Investigation of Compliments and Compliment Responses among Young Japanese. PhD Thesis. University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Ariely, Gal and Eldad Davidov
2011 “Can We Rate Public Support for Democracy in a Comparable Way? Cross-National Equivalence of Democratic Attitudes in the World Value Survey.” Social Indicators Research 104(2):271–286. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Asmuß, Birte and Jakob Steensig
2003 “Samtalen på arbejde. Konversationsanalyse og kompetenceudvikling.” Samfundsliteratur 341–343.Google Scholar
Bayraktaroǧlu, Arın
1991 “Politeness and interactional imbalance.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 921: 5–34. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bergqvist, Thérèse
2009 Compliment responses among native and non-native English speakers: Evidence of Pragmatic transfer from Swedish into English. First Cycle Thesis. University of Gothembburg.Google Scholar
Bjarnardóttir, Ragnhildur
2013 “Leiðsögn kennaranema: stefnur og straumar.” Uppeldi og menntun 22(2): 9–35. https://​ojs​.hi​.is​/uppmennt​/article​/view​/1970Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson
1987 (1978) Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Celce-Murcia, Marianne
1991 “Discourse analysis and grammar instruction.” In Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, ed. by William Grabe, 375–406. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Rong
1993 “Responding to compliments: A contrastive study of politeness strategies between American English and Chinese speakers.” Journal of Pragmatics 20(1): 49–75. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
2011 Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eelen, Gino
2001 A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St Jerome.Google Scholar
Færch, Claus and Gabriele Kasper
1984 “Two ways of defining Communication Strategies.” Language Learning 34(1):45–63. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Golato, Andrea
2002 “German compliment responses.” Journal of Pragmatics 34(5): 547–571. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2005 Compliments and Compliment Responses: Grammatical Structure and Sequential Organization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grein, Marion
2018 “Progress in Language Teaching: From Competence to Dialogic Competence-in-performance.” In From Pragmatics to Dialogue, ed. by Edda Weigand and Istvan Kecskes, 61–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Han, Chung-Hye
1992 “A comparative study of compliment responses: Korean females in Korean interactions and in English interactions.” Working papers in Educational Linguistics 8(2):17–31.Google Scholar
Herbert, Robert
1990 “Sex-based differences in compliment behavior.” Language in Society 191: 201–224. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet
1986 “Compliments and compliment responses in New Zealand English.” Anthropological Linguistics 28(4): 485–508.Google Scholar
1995 Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Houck, Noel and Susan Gass
1996 “Non-native Refusals: A Methodological Perspective.” In Speech Acts across Cultures: Challenges to Communication, ed. by Susan Gass and Joyce Neu, 45–64. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Inglehart, Ronald and Christian Welzel
2010 Changing Mass Priorities. Perspectives on Politics 8(2): 551–557. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine
1997 “A multilevel approach in the study of talk in interaction.” Pragmatics 7(1): 1–20. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Koike, Hiroko
2000 “A comparative study of responses to compliments in terms of subcultures: Interpersonal relations, sex, and generations.” Shinshuu University Journal 1001: 47–55.Google Scholar
O’Driscoll, Jim
2007 “Brown and Levinson’s face: How it can – and can’t – help us to understand interaction across cultures.” Intercultural Pragmatics 4(4): 463–492.Google Scholar
Ólafsson, Stefán
2011 “Level of Living Consequences of Iceland’s financial crisis.” Iceland’s Recovery-Lessons and Challenges Symposium, IMF, CBI; Reykjavik 27th October 2011.Google Scholar
Morrison, Anthea and Janet Holmes
2003 “Eliciting refusals: a methodological challenge.” Te Reo 461: 47–66.Google Scholar
Pomerantz, Anita
1978 “Compliment responses: Notes on the co-operation of multiple constraints”. In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 79–112. New York, NJ: Academic Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rafnsdóttir, Hulda, Ragnheiður Harpa Arnardóttir, & Sigrún Gunnarsdóttir
2015 “Árangur og forysta í hjúkrun: viðhorf til þjónandi forystu, starfsánægju, starfstengdra þátta og gæða þjónustu á sjúkrahúsinu á Akureyri.” Tímarit hjúkrunarfræðinga 91(4): 8–16. https://​www​.hirsla​.lsh​.is​/handle​/2336​/581426Google Scholar
Soenarso, Lany Idawati
1988 Developing social competence in complimenting behaviour among Indonesian learners of English. Unpublished MA thesis. Canberra College of Advanced Education, Canberra.Google Scholar
Sharifian, Farzad
2005 “Cultural schemas in L1 and L2 compliment responses: A study of Persian-speaking learners of English.” Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture 4(1): 55–80.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
1990 You just don’t understand: Women and men in Conversation. New York: Ballantine Books.Google Scholar
Tixier, Maud
1996 Cultural adjustments required by expatriate managers working in the Nordic countries. International Journal of Manpower 17(6):19–42. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Turnbull, William
2001 “An Appraisal of Pragmatic Elicitation Techniques for the Social Psychological Study of Talk: The Case of Request Refusals.” Pragmatics 11(1): 31–61. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Watts, Richard
2003 Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Weigand, Edda
2007 “The Sociobiology of Language.” In Dialogue and Culture, ed. by Marion Grein and Edda Weigand, 27–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 Language as Dialogue: From Rules to Principles of Probability, ed. by Sebastian Feller. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010 Dialogue: The Mixed Game. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2017 The Routledge Handbook of Language and Dialogue. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna
1991 Cross-cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar