Abstract In this article, the forms and role of compliments in French are analysed to identify preferred behaviours in two types of discourse. Forty-five instances of compliments were extracted from everyday interactions and 83 instances from television programmes (talk-shows and talent shows). The linguistic-discursive approach used provides the key to understanding these corpora, revealing processes specific to each genre. In everyday interaction, the use of situational deictics, onomatopoeia, dislocated forms, elliptical structures or the intensifier ‘too’ in its high degree value is favoured, whereas in television programmes, it is rather the high degree of axiological praise, the repetition or successive use of adverbs, or the amplification of paraverbal and extraverbal signals (emphatic intonation or detachment of syllables in certain key terms) are preferred. It shows that ordinary interactions give priority to situational anchoring and a certain spontaneity, whereas television programmes tend to intensify the expression of compliments to capture the audience’s attention by turning exchanges into a spectacle.
Claudel et al. (2026) studied this question.