This paper sheds light on the concept of complimenting, based on its practice in the Moore language spoken in Burkina Faso, West Africa. It revisits Holmes’ (1986) definition of “compliments” and proposes a model which gives new insight into the concept of complimenting behaviour across languages and cultures. The proposed model may have implications for the understanding of politeness strategies as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987), particularly with the urge to integrate third person in the model, as a close examination of data from Moore would suggest. The data analyzed were collected in naturally occurring discourse.