The Study of Compliment Speech Act Responses: Based on Age in Ilam, Iran

Compliments are expressions of positive evaluation and judgment on the addressee s appearance or accomplishments. In other words, in a compliment act the speaker praises or admires the appearance, behavior, characteristics, etc. of the person he talks to or the addressee (Keshavarz, 2011). The present study is intended to examine the effect of age on the compliment responses among Ilami subjects. To achieve this goal, 92 subjects consisting of 46 native speakers of Persian and 46 native speakers of Kurdish participated in this study based on random selection. A discourse completion test (DCT) was employed to elicit the compliment response strategies useded by participants. The findings revealed a rather significant effect of age on compliment responses. Specifically, results show also that Appreciation Token and Formulaic Expressions were the two major compliment response strategies most often preferred by respondents. Moreover, Scale Down , Return , and Reassignment as the items of modesty application for self-praise avoidance, are the next most frequently used response strategies.

Keywords:

speech acts , compliments , compliment responses (CR) , age