Abstract:
Over the last decades, the expressive speech act of compliments has been the focus in
quite a few studies. Most of these studies focused on the structural patterns and/or
the topics of compliments. However, the excessive use of social media tools and the
increase in the use of compliments in these settings made it necessary to dig into the
cultural elements in compliment exchanges and analyse how the faces of self and the
other are co-constructed paying the compliment and responding to it because this
new mode of communication creates a setting where boundaries are vanished and
borders are blurred in interpersonal communication. This cross cultural
understanding can help understand how culture comes into being in online language
use. Compliments in online interaction have become an important research area in
different languages. However, the number of such studies is still quite very limited.
This leads to overgeneralized misconceptions on compliments which undermine the
cultural load of this speech act. This study, using a bilingual corpus made up of 200
compliments collected from 100 participants, analyses the cultural elements in
compliment exchanges and discuss how these cultural elements reflect themselves in
Turkish and American English using quantitative and qualitative data analysis.
