‘Where have you been hiding this voice?’: Judges’ compliments on the TV talent show Arab Idol
Abstract
This study explores compliments given by judges to contestants on the TV talent show Arab Idol. A total of 120 comments from the third season 2014–2015 were analyzed for compliment types, structures, lexicon, and supportive remarks. Spenser-Oatey’s (2000, 2002, 2005a, 2005b, 2008) rapport management theory was employed to determine how judges managed rapport with contestants through compliments. The analysis shows that the majority of judges’ compliments on the show were explicit compliments that were based on three syntactic patterns and four types of positive semantic carriers conveying complimenting adjectives, verbs, nouns, and adverbs. A smaller category of implicit compliments involved such strategies as comparison/contrast, rhetorical questions, and praising contestant’s country. Both categories were typically qualified by supportive or weakening elements such as repetition, encouragement, and criticism, resulting in a third category of ‘macro-compliments’. The study shows that rapport management accounts to a large extent for the judges’ complimenting behavior.
Keywords:
Publication history
Table of contents
Since 2000, the reality television (RTV) genre has attracted the attention of many researchers, especially in academic fields such as media, cultural studies, philosophy, and ethics (Collins 2009). The aim of these studies is not to provide a text-level linguistic analysis, although some of them examine ‘language’ issues in a macro-analytical sense. However, research on essential linguistic issues in RTV programs has recently flourished, focusing on participants’ verbal behavior and interactive discourse (Culpeper 2005; Coyne et al. 2010; Culpeper and Holmes 2013). Impoliteness has been an essential theme in the current literature (Culpeper and Holmes 2013; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich et al. 2013; Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2013; Migdadi et al. 2013) due to the attention it attracts from the audience (Lin 2020).
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