Article published in:
Language and Dialogue
Vol. 7:3 (2017) ► pp. 413–431

Politeness at the extremes

Iranian women’s insincere responses to compliments

| Shahrood University of Technology (Iran)
This study addresses the issue of politeness in compliment responses (CRs) among Iranian female university students. Using naturally occurring talk, 235 compliment-response exchanges were recorded during focus group interviews. The findings revealed that to mitigate impoliteness the interviewees displayed five extreme culture-specific politeness strategies as (1) tarof, (2) shekasteh-nafsi, (3) hyperreciprocation, (4) sha’n, and (5) double positive response. In female-female CR exchanges, interviewees attempted to foster a good impression by resorting to politeness strategies of tarof, hyperreciprocation, and double positive response whereas in male-female CR exchanges, interviewees tried to undermine the appraised impression imposed by the opposite-sex compliments through politeness strategies that are anchored in sha’n and shekasteh-nafsi. This article concludes that Iranian women respond diversely to compliments by virtue of interaction among integrated components: the compliment topic, the complimenter’s sex, and cultural burdens.
Keywords: compliment, insincere responses, Iranian culture, Mixed Game Model, politeness
Published online: 27 November 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.7.3.05mog
References

References

Allami, Hamid and Maryam Montazeri
2012 “Iranian EFL learners’ compliment responses.” System 40 (4): 466–482. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen and Beverly Hartford
2005 Intercultural Pragmatics: Exploring Institutional Talk. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson
1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cheng, Dongmei
2011 “New insights on compliment responses: A comparison between native English speakers and Chinese L2 speakers.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (8): 2204–2214. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Coates, Jennifer
1989 “Gossip Revisited: Language in All-Female Groups.” In Women in their Speech Communities, ed. by Jennifer Coates, and Deborah Cameron, 94–122. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
1996 “Towards an anatomy of impoliteness.” Journal of Pragmatics 25 (3): 349–367. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Czopp, Alexander M.
2008 “When is a compliment not a compliment? Evaluating expressions of positive stereotypes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2): 413–420. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet
2003 Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving
1956 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Grein, Marion
2007 “The Speech Act of Refusal within the Minimal Action Game.” In Dialogue and Culture, ed. by Marion Grein and Edda Weigand, 95–113. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
[ p. 429 ]
Heidari, Mohammad Ali, Mohsen Rezazadeh, and Abbas Eslami Rasekh
2009 “A contrastive study of compliment responses among male & female Iranian teenage EFL learners.” The International Journal of Language, Society and Culture 29: 18–31.Google Scholar
Herbert, Robert K.
1990 “Sex-based differences in compliment behavior.” Language in Society 19 (2): 201–224. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet
1988 “Paying compliments: A sex-preferential politeness strategy.” Journal of Pragmatics 12 (4): 445–465. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ishihara, Noriko and Andrew D. Cohen
2010 Teaching and Learning Pragmatics: Where Language and Culture Meet. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Jaworski, Adam
1995 “This is not an empty compliment! Polish compliments and the expression of solidarity.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 5 (1): 63–94. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kasper, Gabriele
2008 “Data Collection in Pragmatics Research.” In Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, ed. by Helen Spencer-Oatey, 279–303. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine
1987 “La description des échanges en analyse conversationnelle: L’exemple du compliment.” DRLAV-Revue de Linguistique 36–37: 1–53.Google Scholar
Knapp, Mark L., Robert Hopper, and Robert A. Bell
1984 “Compliments: A descriptive taxonomy.” Journal of Communication 34 (4): 12–31. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Manes, Joan
1983 “Compliments: A Mirror of Cultural Values.” In Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition, ed. by Nessa Wolfson, and Elliot Judd, 96–102. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Motaghi-Tabari, Shiva, and Louise de Beuzeville
2012 “A contrastive study of compliment responses among Persian and Australians: The effects of exposure to a new speech community.” Applied Research in English 1: 21–42.Google Scholar
Nkwain, Joseph
2011 “Complimenting and face: A pragma-stylistic analysis of appraisal speech acts in Cameroon Pidgin English.” Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 43 (1): 60–79. CrossrefGoogle 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, San Francisco, London: Academic Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sadeghi, Elahe, and Gholam Reza Zarei
2013 “Investigating the use of compliments in Persian and English: A case study of Iranian EFL students.” Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Translation Studies 2 (2): 30–49.Google Scholar
Sharifian, Farzad
2005 “The Persian cultural schema of shekasteh-nafsi: a study of compliment responses in Persian and Anglo-Australian speakers.” Pragmatics and Cognition 13 (2): 337–361. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Weigand, Edda
2007 “The Sociobiology of Language.” In Dialogue and Culture, ed. by Marion Grein and Edda Weigand, 27–49. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010 Dialogue: The Mixed Game. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 “How to verify a theory of dialogue.” Language and Dialogue 6 (3): 349–369. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yousefvand, Zohreh
2010 Study of compliment speech act realization patterns across gender in Persian. Arizona Working Papers in SLA & Teaching 17: 91–112.Google Scholar