Cover not available
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: 4 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00066.gon
References (39)
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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. [URL]Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987 (1978). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Golato, Andrea. 2002. “German compliment responses.” Journal of Pragmatics 34(5): 547–571. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 1997. “A multilevel approach in the study of talk in interaction.” Pragmatics 7(1): 1–20. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle 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. [URL]Google 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Watts, Richard. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weigand, Edda. 2007. “The Sociobiology of Language.” In Dialogue and Culture, ed. by Marion Grein and Edda Weigand, 27–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. Language as Dialogue: From Rules to Principles of Probability, ed. by Sebastian Feller. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. Dialogue: The Mixed Game. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar