Compliments in English and Persian interaction: A cross-cultural perspective

The study of compliments has attracted the attention of many scholars (e.g., Goffman 1971; Lakoff 1973; Brown and Levinson 1978; Amouzadeh 2001; Golato 2002; Sharifian 2005) and has become a major issue in the area of interactional sociolinguistics. To date, many models of politeness have been put forward in the literature. In this study, Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) politeness model was used to carry out a comparative analysis. The compliment response behavior of native Persian speakers was compared with that of native speakers of American English to see if it can provide evidence for applicability of Brown and Levinson’s universal model. The data were taken from a corpus of 50 hours of recording the live interviews from the Persian and English TV channels. The results show Persian and English speakers use different strategies and culture has an important effect on speakers’ speech act performance. The results also demonstrate the inapplicability of Brown and Levinson’s model for cross-cultural comparisons.