Compliments in Cross-Cultural Perspective

It is well known that languages differ greatly from one another in their patterns and norms of interaction. Up to now, however, there has been very little systematic comparison of language from the points of view of speech acts and rules of speaking. The speech act of complimenting, as an example of the kind of sociolinguistic information needed in order to understand the problems of language learners, is here examined in some detail. The semantic and syntactic structure of compliments in American English is described and comparisons are made with complimenting behavior in other cultures. Communicative competence is now widely recognized as an important goal of language teaching, and a good deal has been written concerning the necessity of making knowledge about sociolinguistic rules a part of classroom instruction in ESL or, indeed, in any second language (Hymes 1972b, Grimshaw 1973, Paulston 1974, Applegate 1975, Taylor and Wolfson 1978). At the same time, sociolinguistic studies, particularly those which take as their rhetorical framework the ethnography of speaking as proposed by Dell Hymes (1962), have made it clear that languages differ greatly in patterns and norms of interaction. Up to this point, however, there has been very little systematic comparison of languages from the point of view of speech acts and rules of speaking, and as a result, very little attention paid to describing the sorts of communicative interference' which may occur as people learn second languages. As an example of the sort of sociolinguistic information needed in order to understand the problems facing second language learners, it is useful to examine in some detail one speech act: complimenting. For the past three years, my colleague Joan Manes and I have been engaged in a thoroughgoing analysis of complimenting behavior in American English (Wolfson and Manes in press, Manes and Wolfson in press). For the purposes of comparison, we included in our corpus a small sample of compliments collected by non-native speakers of English interacting with members of their own speech communities, both in English and in their native languages. Examination of these data makes it clear that a single speech act may vary greatly across speech communities. In particular, what counts as a compliment may differ very much from one society to another. Even allowing for problems of translation, some of the data which were collected by non-native speakers Ms. Wolfson is Director, Educational Linguistics/TESOL, at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Her articles have appeared in Language in Society, Language, and Working Papers in Sociolingusitics.