Perception of compliment responses among young adult speakers from Lombardy

• CRs are co-constructed relational acts best explained by Arundale's Face Constituting Theory, not face-threat models. • Politeness in Italian CRs follows generational norms: agreement is polite, disagreement rude, regardless of speakers’ origin. • Respondents show pragmatic self-referentiality, attributing CRs to their own region despite real regional variation. • Irony/joking in CRs is interpretively unstable, shaped by sociocultural norms of humor, solidarity, and shared frames. • Production and perception diverge: regional differences in output are masked by in-group bias and generational identity.