Speech Act Research Between Armchair, Field and Laboratory The Case of Compliments

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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1611–1635

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Speech act research between armchair, field and laboratory

The case of compliments
Andreas H. Jucker
English Department, University of Zurich, Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Received 14 August 2008; received in revised form 16 December 2008; accepted 10 February 2009
Abstract
In this paper I discuss pragmatic research methods and their suitability to different research questions in speech act research. Clark
and Bangerter [Clark, H.H., Bangerter, A., 2004. Changing ideas about reference. In: Noveck, I.A., Sperber, D. (Eds.), Experimental
Pragmatics (Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition). Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, pp. 25–49] use the terms
‘‘armchair’’, ‘‘field’’ and ‘‘laboratory’’ to refer to linguistic methods based on intuited data, natural data and elicited data, respectively.
In this paper I will not argue for the superiority of one of these methods over the other two. I take the view that it depends on the specific
research question whether one or the other of these three approaches can yield useful insights. I will illustrate these considerations with
research efforts in the field of compliment research. Compliments are particularly interesting because they pose a politeness dilemma
for the recipient, who either has to violate the maxim of agreement or the maxim of modesty. They have been investigated from very
different perspectives (pattern of the compliment, the demographics of the complimenter and the compliment recipient, compliment
responses and so on) and with a range of different methods (including the notebook method, the corpus method and discourse
completion tests). I will review this literature and discuss the suitability of individual methods in relation to individual research
questions.
# 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Speech acts; Research methods; Compliments; Politeness
1. Introduction
Clark and Bangerter (2004: 25) introduce the designations ‘‘armchair’’, ‘‘field’’ and ‘‘laboratory’’ to refer to three
different ways of carrying out linguistic or pragmatic research. The designations are based on the typical locations in
which these methods are used. Armchair linguists use philosophical methods and data based on intuition, and for this,
they supposedly do not have to leave the comforts of an armchair. Field linguists use empirical methods of
investigation to analyse actual uses of natural language which can be found ‘‘out in the field’’ so to speak. And
laboratory linguists carry out experiments in a laboratory to elicit data from suitable informants. All three methods
have been used for pragmatic research in general and for research on speech acts in particular. And all three methods
have been praised as the only useful method or criticized as being completely unsuitable. I take a more pragmatic
stance and will try to assess the usefulness of the different methods in relation to specific research questions. I will
illustrate my considerations with research that has been carried out on compliments.
E-mail address: ahjucker@es.uzh.ch.
0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.02.004
1612 A.H. Jucker / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1611–1635
Compliments have attracted a considerable amount of research. They have been analyzed in specific language
communities and they have been compared across different communities. It seems obvious that they are culture specific
and sociologically conditioned. Compliments that are appropriate in a particular situation for one language community
may be inappropriate in a comparable situation for another language community. And there are considerable differences
in the way communicators respond to compliments. In general terms, compliments provide a double bind for the recipient
of the compliment. If he or she accepts the compliment, it might create an impression of immodesty. If he or she rejects the
compliment, it might create the impression of disagreeing with the complimenter. Different language communities
evaluate the dangers in different ways and as a consequence speakers of different language communities respond in
different ways to compliments.
Most of the research on compliments to date has been carried out on the basis of compliments elicited with the help of
discourse completion tests or on the basis of compliments collected through the notebook method but generally
researchers do not discuss their research methods in any detail (except for Yuan, 2001; Golato, 2005: chapter 2). If they
do, they usually argue for the superiority of their own chosen method and dismiss the others. Manes and Wolfson (1981:
115), for instance, dismiss all approaches apart from what they call the ‘‘ethnographic approach’’, which, according to
them, ‘‘is the only reliable method for collecting data about the way compliments, or indeed, any other speech act
functions’’. Yuan (2001) and Golato (2003, 2005: chapter 2), on the other hand, both provide a comparison and critique of
different data collection methods, and they both note a connection between the research questions and the chosen research
method.
In this paper, I discuss the speech act research method in a more systematic and more comprehensive manner.
In principle, what I have to say is applicable to a broad range of speech acts, perhaps to all of them. In Section 2, I will
discuss different definitions of ‘‘compliments’’ and distinguish different types of compliments. In Section 3, I will give
a more detailed overview of the different pragmatic research methods under the three headings ‘‘armchair’’, ‘‘field’’
and ‘‘laboratory’’. In the main part of this paper, Section 4, I will propose a range of research questions for
compliments and discuss the suitability of the different research methods for each of these (sets of) questions.
2. Definitions
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a compliment as ‘‘a ceremonial act or expression as a tribute of courtesy,
‘usually understood to mean less than it declares’ (J.); now, esp. a neatly-turned remark addressed to any one, implying
or involving praise; but, also applied to a polite expression of praise or commendation in speaking of a person, or to any
act taken as equivalent thereto.’’ (OED ‘‘compliment’’, n.). This covers several types of compliments that I want to
distinguish. I propose the following names for them: ‘‘personal compliments’’, ‘‘ceremonious compliments’’, ‘‘season
compliments’’ and ‘‘free gift compliments’’.
2.1. Personal compliments
Holmes (1988, 1995) provides the following definition for what I call a ‘‘personal compliment’’:
A compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker,
usually the person addressed, for some ‘good’ (possession, characteristic, skill etc.) which is positively valued
by the speaker and the hearer. (Holmes, 1988: 446; 1995: 117)
Several elements of this definition deserve some discussion. The core of the definition focuses on the attribution of
credit to somebody for some ‘‘good’’. Examples are given for this ‘‘good’’. It can be a possession, a characteristic, a
skill and so on. The list can be continued, and some of the compliment research deals exactly with the question which
objects or ‘‘goods’’ are typically complimented on. According to the definition it is not the speaker who is attributed
credit, but typically the addressee. It is not mentioned in this quotation but there has to be a link from the ‘‘someone’’
who is attributed credit to the addressee of the compliment, otherwise the utterance is more likely to be understood as
praise on some third party but not as compliment (see Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989 on the boundary problem
between praising and complimenting). In fact, it is an interesting question how much connection there has to be
between the target of the compliment and the addressee of the compliment.
Personal compliments can be explicit, implicit or indirect. While the definition given by Holmes clearly includes
implicit compliments, compliment research usually focuses on explicit compliments only. Explicit personal
A.H. Jucker / Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1611–1635 1613
compliments are the prototypical compliments that say something positive about the addressee. Compliment research
is almost exclusively restricted to this type. Extracts (1)–(3) exemplify typical examples. They are taken from the
British National Corpus, but they correspond closely to the patterns identified by Manes and Wolfson (1981) as typical
for American English compliments.
(1) Your hair always looks really nice anyway. (BNC KPS 728)
(2) ‘‘You look wonderful,’’ said John, ‘‘glowing with health. Shall I pour you a cup of tea? It’s just made.’’
(BNC A0R 2262-4)
(3) After she had finished signing, I approached her, clutching a drink. ‘‘That was great,’’ I said. ‘‘And I love
your dress.’’ (BNC AEO 1923-4)
These examples were retrieved from the British National Corpus by searching for stereotypical phrases, such as
‘‘looks really nice’’, ‘‘you look wonderful’’ and ‘‘I love your’’. Such corpus queries, of course, yield many unwanted
hits. But a manual search of these hits easily provided some relevant examples.
Cordella et al. (1995: 235) use the term ‘‘implicit compliments’’ to refer to utterances like (4) in which the
participants can infer an intended compliment even if it was not explicitly uttered.
(4) I wish I could play the piano like you do.
The extracts given in (5) and (6), also taken from the British National Corpus, contain implicit compliments. In (5),
Jay feels complimented because Lucy thinks he is competent enough to help her write an article. And in (6), the use of
the address term ‘‘Doctor’’ is perceived as a compliment by the recipient.
(5) Lucy wanted Jay to help her write the article. Jay was delighted with the compliment (BNC A0L 149)
(6) ‘‘Goodbye, Doctor.’’ She meant it as a compliment but it made me sound like her GP. (BNC A0F 950)
These examples were retrieved by searching for the term ‘‘compliment’’ itself.
Yuan (2001: 286) points out that compliments can also be indirect. The speaker does not make the compliment
himself or herself but quotes somebody else as saying something complimentary about the addressee. Yuan quotes an
example in which the researcher made the utterance in (7) to the wife of a former classmate:
(7) Sun Ping said that the preserved vegetables you made were the most delicious!
In this case, Sun Ping, the original complimenter was present when the researcher reported her compliment to the
recipient of the compliment. Intuitively it seems that such embedded or reported compliments may be fairly frequent,
but they do not seem to have been treated systematically in the relevant research literature.
2.2. Ceremonious compliments
The definition of the Oxford English Dictionary quoted above describes ‘‘compliment’’ as ‘‘a ceremonial act or
expression as a tribute of courtesy, ‘usually understood to mean less than it declares’’’, before it goes on to define
present-day compliments as a ‘‘neatly-turned remark addressed to any one, implying or involving praise’’. Historical
material, especially of the seventeenth and eighteenth century provides a lot of evidence for compliments that
correspond to the opening definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary. Following Taavitsainen and Jucker
(2008, forthcoming), I use the term ‘‘ceremonious compliments’’ for these. Beetz (1990, 1999) analyses such
ceremonious compliments in the Old German empire. He describes them as follows.
The term compliment as used in the Old German empire indicates its French origin in its spelling, pronunciation and
above all in its meaning. It does not only signify a compliment as we understand the word today, but is a far more
comprehensive term embracing oral, written and even non-verbal interaction rituals for everyday and ceremonious
communication situations. For example we may list here greetings and farewells, congratulations and condolence,
requests and thanks, all forms of initiating and maintaining contact such as introducing oneself and others,
regards, recommendations, invitations, announcements, invitations to dance, good wishes, promises, offers of
service, presentations, apologies; even ‘‘reprimand compliments’’ are not considered to be a contradiction in terms.
(Beetz, 1999: 142)
The examples in (8) and (9) are taken from early English newspapers in the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN).
(8) Tis believed the Pope will order him to compliment the Duke of Mantoua upon his late Marriage with the
Princess of Guastala. (ZEN lgz0051, 1671)
(9) The Swiss Cantons have no formal Notice as yet given them; of the Duke of Anjou’s Accession to the Throne of
Spain, so that they have time enough to bethink themselves concerning the Compliment of Congratulation.
(ZEN fpt 0088, 1701)
In these passages the early newspapers report ceremonial acts. The Duke of Mantua is congratulated on his marriage in
(8), and the Duke of Anjou is congratulated on his accession the throne of Spain in (9). In both cases, the compliments
are official and ceremonial acts of diplomacy, and they correspond to the OED description that they are paid as a
‘‘tribute to courtesy’’.
Extracts (10) and (11) are taken from Matthew Lewis’ Gothic novel The Monk, first published in 1796. They also
illustrate ‘‘ceremonial acts’’.
(10) The old Lady with many expressions of gratitude, but without much difficulty, accepted the offer, and seated
herself: The young one followed her example, but made no other compliment than a simple and graceful
reverence. (The Monk, p. 10)
(11) His Cell was thronged by the Monks, anxious to express their concern at his illness; And He was still occupied in
receiving their compliments on his recovery, when the Bell summoned them to the Refectory. (The Monk, p. 84)
In (10), the compliment does not even involve words. It is a compliment of thanks by a young lady who, together with
her older companion, has been offered seats in a church by two young gentlemen. The compliments described in (11)
are good wishes received after a recovery from illness. The actual words of these compliments are not given. They
may, of course, involve praise for the recovery and as such they are in an obvious way related to the personal
compliment. These compliments take place in private contexts, whereas the compliments reported by the newspapers
in (8) and (9), take place in a public context.
The extracts (8) and (9) have again been retrieved by a search for the term ‘‘compliment’’ in the ZEN corpus, and
extracts (10) and (11) by a combination of the philological method and a corpus search in the Project Gutenberg (http://
www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/tmonk10.txt).
2.3. Season compliments and free gift compliments
Under the term ‘‘season compliments’’ I subsume compliments that imply good wishes and typically appear in
phrases such as (12) or (13). (12) is typical for emails written around the time of Christmas, while (13) is a phrase that
seems to be stereotypically associated with spam emails.
(12) With the compliments of the season (Email from Sylvester Osu, November 18, 2007)
(13) Compliments of the day
In addition, the term ‘‘compliment’’ is often used with free gifts. In (14), diners in a restaurant receive a free drink from
the waiter. And (15), which is taken from a television newsscript, indicates the sponsor of the first prize for a
competition.
(14) ‘‘Monsieur, mademoiselle, with the compliments of the restaurant. I think you celebrate today, yes?’’
(BNC ACE 267-8)
(15) we’ve one winner already . . . and they’ll be on their way to Aintree tomorrow compliments of the
Central South Grand National Competition (BNC K1K 1434)
Both the season compliments and the free gift compliments seem closely related to the ‘‘ceremonious
compliments’’. In contrast to the ‘‘personal compliments’’, they do not attribute credit to the addressee. They designate
a formula for situationally appropriate and gracious behaviour. However, these types of compliment shall not be
discussed in any detail in this paper.
3. Armchair, field and laboratory
Clark and Bangerter (2004: 25) have introduced the notions of ‘‘armchair’’, ‘‘field’’ and ‘‘laboratory’’ to refer to
three different ways of doing pragmatic research. In a nutshell, they describe these approaches as follows:
Language use isn’t easy to study. It has been investigated largely by three methods – intuition, experiment and
observation. With intuitions, you imagine examples of language used in this or that situation and ask yourself
whether they are grammatical or ungrammatical, natural or unnatural, appropriate or inappropriate. This was
Searle’s method. With experiments, you invite people into the laboratory, induce them to produce, comprehend
or judge samples of language, and measure their reactions. With observations, you note what people say or write
as they go about their daily business. We will name these methods by their characteristic locations: armchair,
laboratory and field.
The term ‘‘armchair’’ may sound somewhat disparaging, but I find the terms useful to think about the different
research methods in pragmatics, and I use them here without any evaluative undertones. In fact, I argue explicitly that
all three of them can be used to increase our knowledge of language and language use as long as they are used
judiciously with a clear understanding of their respective strengths and limitations and without any undue expectations
that any of them might be able to solve all the problems in linguistics.
3.1. The armchair method
The term ‘‘armchair method’’ stands for approaches that do not analyze actual language data but work with
reflections on language. I distinguish between philosophical investigations that are based on introspection and
researcher intuition, and interviews that elicit opinions and assessments from speakers of a language or language
variety. The former I call the philosophical method, and the latter the interview method.
The early work on speech acts was dominated by philosophical approaches. In his William James Lectures
delivered at Harvard in 1955, the philosopher J.L. Austin developed his theory of speech actions as a reaction to logical
positivism (published posthumously in Austin, 1962). Language, he argued, was not only used to make true or false
statements, but it was used to carry out actions, to promise, to apologize, to ask and so on. Such actions are not true or
false; they are felicitous or non-felicitous (see Allen, 1998 for an overview). John R. Searle, also a philosopher,
developed and systematized Austin’s account. He provided a detailed account of the structure of illocutionary acts
with the example of promises.
In order to give an analysis of the illocutionary act of promising I shall ask what conditions are necessary and
sufficient for the act of promising to have been successfully and non-defectively performed in the utterance of a
given sentence. (Searle, 1969: 54)
The analysis proceeds by stating four different types of rules for each speech act, viz., the propositional content
rule, the preparatory condition, the sincerity condition and the essential condition (see Section 4.1 below).
With the interview method the researcher does not rely on his or her own intuition but he or she asks native or non-
native speakers for their intuition about language and language use. Yuan (2001), for example, asked native speakers of
Chinese about their attitudes to compliments and compliment responses. Thus, I want to make a distinction between the
armchair method of speaker interviews in which they are asked about their intuitions on language and the laboratory
method of discourse completion tests or role-plays in which they are asked to produce relevant samples of language.
3.2. The field method
The field method is based on observation of naturally occurring data, and as such it is strictly empirical. It crucially
depends on data that has not been elicited by the researcher for the purpose of his or her research project but that occurs
for communicative reasons outside of the research project for which it is used. Researchers often insist on spoken data,
but the data can also be written, as long as it was originally produced with a communicative end. Letters, emails, short
text messages and other forms of personal communication clearly have communicative aims. A writer wants to
communicate with a specific reader or addressee of the text. Research articles, newspaper features or novels also have
communicative aims even if the writer has only a vague idea of who the readers of his or her text will be. Therefore, I
apply the term ‘‘field method’’ to all empirical analyses of language that was produced outside of the research project,
and it comprises four different approaches: the notebook method, the philological method, the conversation analytical
method and the corpus method.
In the notebook method the researcher takes notes of compliments that he or she encounters in his or her daily life.
Very often the researcher enlists the help of other compliment collectors, typically the researcher’s students. In this
way a large number of compliment exchanges can be collected easily and quickly. Manes and Wolfson call this method
the ‘‘ethnographic approach’’ and, as pointed out above, they claim that it is ‘‘the only reliable method for collecting
data about the way compliments, or indeed, any other speech act functions’’ (Manes and Wolfson, 1981: 115).
In the philological method, the researcher reads data, typically novels or other fictional material, and makes notes of
all the compliments that can be found. In this method, the researcher has time to go back over the material several times
to make sure that he or she did not miss a single compliment. Given enough resources two or more researchers can scan
the same data to make sure that compliments are collected consistently and reliably. Findings for fictional language
obviously cannot be generalised to other forms of language. In addition, several communicative levels have to be
distinguished. At one level the author of a novel, for instance, communicates with the reader of this novel (see Sell,
2000). At embedded levels it is normal to talk about the implied author and the implied reader, and in addition there are
fictional characters that communicate with each other. Compliments are possible at all levels. The real author may
communicate directly with a real and very specific reader, e.g. a wealthy patron, and compliment him or her as a form
of thanks. The implied author may address an implied reader, and obviously the characters on the various narratorial
levels may pay and receive compliments. If fictional data is considered to have some value for pragmaticists, the
method will provide a large and varied number of compliments. Moreover, fictional data has the advantage of
providing a narrator perspective. The narrator often comments on the attitudes of the characters even if they do not
express their sentiments explicitly.
While the fictional nature of the data may make this kind of method unusable for many purposes, an additional
problem is that the method is very time consuming and erratic. It depends on experienced readers who have reliable
hunches about novels in which compliments are likely to occur. Such hunches may be misguided, and even with
the investment of a lot of research resources the method can only cover a limited amount of material and therefore
necessarily must remain very selective.
In the conversation analytical method transcriptions of actual conversations are used. The researcher reads
the transcriptions of conversations and picks out the compliments that occur in the material. This method is very time
consuming. It is similar to the philological method except that it uses a different type of material. Depending on the
frequency of compliments, it may be very difficult to collect a sufficient number of instances for an analysis.
Strictly speaking, the philological method and the conversation analytical method both depend on a corpus that
is searched for compliments, but under the heading of corpus method I subsume approaches that use electronic
corpora and computerized search techniques. In the philological method fictional material is manually searched for
instances of compliments, and in the conversation analytical approach transcriptions of actual conversations are
searched in this way. In the corpus method, however, search strings are developed that locate in one way or another
instances of compliments. Two types of corpus searches can be distinguished. A corpus search can search for the
speech act verb ‘‘compliment’’ itself, or it can search for syntactic patterns or lexical elements that are typical for
actual compliments.
Speech act verbs can occur performatively, descriptively and in negotiations. In apologies, for instance, the speech
act verb is used performatively if a speaker says ‘‘I apologize’’. It is used descriptively in ‘‘He apologized for his rude
behaviour’’. And – often in its nominalized form – it is used in negotiations about the speech act value of an utterance
in a question, such as ‘‘Was this an apology?’’. Corpus searches can easily locate such instances in large corpora.
The extracts in (16) and (17) give examples of the verb ‘‘compliment’’ used performatively.
(16) Er, before I call Mr <name> can I <pause> compliment the council on the way that this debate has gone.
(BNC JNB 738)
(17) Erm, I would like to particularly compliment the Fire Service on the magnificent job they were doing there, in,
in the most appalling conditions. (BNC J3s 337)
In both cases, the speaker compliments the audience or part of the audience on their achievements and explicitly uses the
verb ‘‘compliment’’ for the purpose. In (16), the complimentary nature of the speech act is exclusively carried by the verb
itself. The rest of the utterance is neutral and does not evaluate the addresses. In (17), on the other hand, the designation ‘‘a
magnificent job’’ provides a positive evaluation and reinforces the value of the performative speech act verb.
In extracts (18) and (19) the noun ‘‘compliment’’ is used to describe a particular utterance as a compliment. It is not
used to perform a compliment on the occasion of the utterance.
(18) The nicest compliment I’m paid, inside and outside the business, is when people say how professional I am.
(BNC EVN 58)
(19) Ernie Walker, the SFA secretary, confirmed yesterday that there would be no objections from the authorities if
United decide to go. McLean said: ‘‘It really would be great if we could fit in such a match. It is a great
compliment and a chance for us to find out about Costa Rica.’’ (BNC AAN 126-128)
In extract (19), the term ‘‘compliment’’ is more than just a description of an utterance. It refers to Ernie Walker’s
confirmation mentioned in the previous sentence that there would be no objections from the authorities against a match.
McLean describes this confirmation as a compliment and at the same time he actually designates it as a compliment. The
addressees of McLean’s utterance might not have interpreted Ernie Walker’s confirmation in such a way.
Extracts (20) and (21) are even clearer cases of negotiations of the status of particular utterances.
(20) A: What did he say?

B: He said, you’re a real roly-poly did you hear him?
A: Is that an insult or a compliment? (BNC KBL 5076)
(21) A: Did we serve you cigarettes before?
B: Yeah. <pause>
A: Well you don’t look old enough.
B: I don’t look old enough?
<pause> People tell me I’m twenty and I’m seventeen. <pause>
A: That’s a compliment. (BNC KP4 2194)
In (20), speaker A wants to know whether to be called ‘‘a real roly-poly’’ is an insult or a compliment. Thus A is the
recipient of the compliment if it was meant as such. The example is also an illustration that utterances can be
indeterminate and their status as compliments may be negotiable and it may even be left deliberately open by the
speaker. In (21), speaker B is told that he or she does not look old enough to be sold cigarettes. Obviously, B is irritated
by this, so A asserts that it is a compliment to look so young.
A search for surface strings that are typical for compliments is more difficult. Speech acts are functional categories.
They are defined on the basis of their function, not their form, but many speech acts exhibit typical surface patterns or
they occur regularly with a small range of lexical items. Questions are often realized in interrogative form. In written
form they end with a question mark and in spoken form with a typical interrogative intonation. Apologies often use
words like sorry, pardon, or excuse. Such formal features have been called ‘‘explicit illocutionary force indicators’’
(Searle, 1969: 30) or ‘‘illocutionary force indicating devices’’, ‘‘IFIDs’’ (Levinson, 1983: 238) because they indicate
the illocutionary force of the speech act in which they occur. IFIDs, therefore, can be used to automatically locate
relevant speech acts. But speech acts do not always include IFIDs, and IFIDs that do occur may be deceptive.
Questions, for instance, can appear in different syntactic forms as well, and apologies do not always include the words
sorry, pardon or excuse, and IFIDs such as I warn you may signal a threat rather than a warning. But such
conventionalized patterns are useful in the automatic identification of potentially relevant speech acts.
It is an open question whether compliments are sufficiently standardized to allow such search techniques. Any
research trying to use this kind of approach must first identify typical surface strings and typical lexical items before
they can be used in corpus-based searches for compliments. According to Manes and Wolfson (1981), American
English compliments show a remarkable lack of originality. In their data collected with the notebook method, a small
range of syntactic strings and a small range of positive adjectives are regularly used. Such strings and such adjectives
are potential candidates for corpus searches of compliments (see Jucker et al., 2008 reviewed in Section 4.2 below). As
in all other corpus-based searches, the researcher will have to balance the precision and the recall of his or her search
patterns. The search may either retrieve many hits that on manual inspection turn out not to be compliments (the
problem of precision), or it may fail to retrieve actual compliments (the problem of recall).
3.3. The laboratory method
In the laboratory method, the researcher uses various forms of elicitation techniques to prompt speakers to
produce certain utterances. This method relies on the cooperation of informants. They are asked to imagine
communicative situations and to state how they would behave in such situations or how they expect other people to
behave in these situations. Thus the informants communicate without their own intrinsic communicative intentions.
They behave in ‘‘as if’’ situations. This may be experienced as unnatural and artificial, but it allows the researcher to
have greater control over many different variables.
Two main approaches shall be discussed as examples of the laboratory method: discourse completion tests and role-
plays. The discourse completion test (often also called discourse completion task) has a very long history in speech act
research. It was used by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989a) in their Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP),
in which the speech acts ‘‘request’’ and ‘‘apology’’ were contrasted in a range of languages. The method depends on
invented short dialogues in which one utterance is missing, but the context makes it clear that in this particular position
a particular type of speech act is required. It is easy to administer this test quickly to a large number of informants.
According to Blum-Kulka et al. (1989b: 13), DCTs have several advantages over the field method. They concede that
the data should come from ‘‘natural’’ conditions, but with the field method they would not be able to collect a large
sample of data. With discourse completion tests, the researchers elicit more stereotyped responses, which will reveal
the actual cross-cultural differences in a sharper contrast.
Blum-Kulka et al. (1989a: 274) use dialogues such as the following to elicit requests (22) and apologies (23).
(22) In a crowded non-smoking compartment

David S. is going by train from London to Manchester. In Watford another passenger enters the non-smoking
compartment and takes the last available seat. After a while he lights a cigarette.
David S.:______________________________
Passenger: Okay, I’ll put it out.
(23) In the lobby of the university library
Jim and Charlie have agreed to meet at six o’clock to work on a joint project. Charlie arrives on time and Jim
is half an hour late.
Charlie: I almost gave up on you!
Jim:__________________________________
Charlie: O.K. Let’s start working.
This method has been discussed and criticized widely (e.g. Trosborg, 1994: 142–143; Beebe and Cummings, 1996;
Yuan, 2001: 283; Golato, 2003: 92, 2005: 13). It has been noted that some dialogues put the informants into roles with
which they are unfamiliar. This may create unnatural utterances. The space provided on the sheets constrains the
length of the utterance, and the follow-up turn which is also provided is also unnatural because the informant knows
ahead of time how the imaginary interlocutor will react to his or her utterance.
More recently DCTs have also been administered in oral form in order to avoid the problem that people don’t write
how they talk.
One inherent drawback of the DCT technique, whether oral or written, is that it does not allow negotiation
between the imaginary DCT character and the real-life interlocutor, so multiple turns become impossible
unless a second-turn rejoinder is provided. As a result, respondents have to say everything in one turn,
causing longer DCT responses than what is actually produced in natural speech, at least in the first turn
(Yuan, 2001: 284)
The role-play method asks participants to act out conversations in particular situations described to them by the
researcher. The participants are asked to communicate in the way that they or some other person would in a given
situation. In fact, a terminological distinction is often made between role-plays and role enactments. In role-plays,
the participants react as if they were someone else. A participant who is a student plays the role of a professor, for
instance. In role enactments the participants perform a role that is part of their everyday life and personality.
A student plays the role of a student (Trosborg, 1994: 144). Trosborg (1994) used this method to investigate the
different ways in which native speakers of English, native speakers of Danish and Danish learners of English at
different levels of competence perform requests, complaints and apologies. The participants were given appropriate
situations to act out and were then videotaped in dyadic face-to-face conversations lasting approximately 5 min
(Trosborg, 1994: 150). In the following I shall use the term ‘‘role-play’’ as a cover term for both enactments of
familiar and unfamiliar roles.
4. Research questions
Researchers tend to defend their chosen methods as the only one that provides reliable and useful results and
criticize other methods as completely unsuitable. It is often overlooked or ignored that other methods may be just as
useful to tackle different research questions. It is, therefore, important to discuss the individual methods in relation to
the questions that they are supposed to answer. Discourse completion tests, for instance, have their problems. But
rather than dismissing them out of hand, they should be evaluated carefully as to what kinds of question they can
answer and what kinds of question they cannot answer.
In the following I will provide a list of research aims for speech act research, and in particular for the research of
compliments. Such questions can be asked for specific languages or language varieties, but they can also be asked
contrastively for two or more languages (see, for instance, Cordella et al., 1995 for a contrastive analysis of Australian
English and Spanish compliments); for two or more language varieties (see, for instance, Herbert, 1989 for a
contrastive American English–South African English analysis); or for two or more historical stages of the same
language (see, for instance, Taavitsainen and Jucker, 2008 on compliments in the history of English).
4.1. Nature of compliments
The first set of questions relates to the nature of compliments. The following set of questions is relevant.
What is the nature of a true compliment? How can we distinguish between sincere, empty and ironic
compliments? Can compliments that are situationally more or less required still be sincere?
Such questions have received little attention in the literature on compliments even though they seem to be rather
crucial. It is intuitively obvious that some compliments are made with the speaker’s sincere appreciation for whatever
he or she praises about the addressee, while other compliments take the form of a speech formula that has to be
produced on certain occasions. In Western cultures, dinner invitations regularly more or less require a compliment
about the food. A significantly changed appearance (new glasses, a new hair-cut, a shaved-off beard, a noticeably new
piece of apparel, etc.) often requires a compliment or at least a comment from friends. Compliments that are given in
such a situation are often felt to be less sincere, and special strategies are sometimes used to make them appear sincere
in spite of their predictable nature (Jaworski, 1995).
Philosophers think about speech actions. What makes a compliment a compliment? Searle’s (1969: ch. 3) analysis
of the structure of illocutionary acts is particularly helpful for a consideration of the nature of compliments. Let us
consider the following invented example.
(24) You have put on weight.
In normal circumstances this is not a compliment because in Western societies it is more desirable to look healthy, fit
and lean. It is normally undesirable to put on weight, and therefore an utterance like (24) does not sound like a positive
statement on a characteristic feature of the addressee. However, it is easy to imagine circumstances in which (24) could
indeed be seen as a compliment, and this tells us something about the felicity conditions of compliments. It is essential
that the attribution is seen as desirable for the addressee. If it is desirable for the addressee to put on weight because he
or she has been underweight, because he or she has lost too much weight in an illness or something similar, then (24)
can count as a compliment. This would lead to the following felicity conditions.
Propositional content condition: Predication P about H
Preparatory condition: P is desirable
Sincerity condition: S thinks that P is desirable and that H also thinks P is desirable
Essential condition: Counts as an expression of S’s positive evaluation of P
The philosophical method is much more important than it may appear to pragmaticists who prefer empirical
research methods. An analysis of compliments always presumes that the researcher knows what a compliment is. Thus
even a field linguist cannot set out on his or her investigation of compliments without precise reflections on what
constitutes the nature of a compliment.
The only alternative would be to investigate only those entities that are named ‘‘compliment’’ by the members of a
speech community (see, for instance, Watts, 2003, who proposes such a method to investigate politeness). This opens
up an interesting ethnographic line of research. But people may be very inconsistent when they use the term
‘‘compliment’’. It is in the nature of lexical items that they have fuzzy denotations.
Thus the philosophical method, even if this is not explicitly acknowledged, is often used at the beginning of an
empirical investigation in order to identify and define the object under investigation.
The researcher who does not trust his or her own intuition (e.g. because he or she is not a native speaker of the language
to be investigated) might decide to ask native speakers for their intuition. This would – of course – force the researcher to
leave the comfortable armchair and search for native speakers who are willing to be interviewed, but it does not change the
research method very significantly. Instead of suggesting felicity conditions for a speech act on the basis of his or her own
intuition, the researcher asks native speakers what for them the crucial elements of compliments are. Such interviews are
very different from oral discourse completion tests or from role-plays. Here, informants are not asked to produce
specimens of language to be analyzed but they are asked to produce opinions and assessments of the unit under
investigation. They are also different from the traditional sociolinguistic interviews in which speakers are prompted to
talk about their life history (see, e.g. Kasper, 2000: 321). These interviews provide a meta task for the interviewees. Yuan
(2001), for instance, carried out semi-structured oral interviews with informants who had just performed a discourse
completion test.
The informants were invited to share their opinions or experiences of giving and receiving compliments in the
dialect. They were also asked to recall the last two compliments they had given and received, how the
compliments were responded to, who the interactants were, and the contexts in which the compliments occurred.
(Yuan, 2001: 275)
It appears that such an approach can indeed offer insights into native speaker perceptions of this particular speech
act.
With field methods, researchers try to locate compliments within a suitable corpus, but they can only search for
typical strings if they already know what a compliment is. Such an approach presumes a precise definition of a
compliment, and it cannot be expected to yield a more precise definition or further insights into the nature of
compliments as a result. However, the researcher can search for the speech act verb ‘‘compliment’’ (used as a verb or a
as a noun). In this way he or she can find out how the term is used in a variety of settings and in this way he or she can
get a truly ethnographic account of compliments. It is to be expected that such an account would reflect the
inconsistencies of the everyday usage of the term, but it is likely to uncover an interesting range of native speaker
perceptions of compliments. To my knowledge, such an approach has not been attempted yet.
Discourse completion tests ask participants to provide the missing turns in invented conversations. Whether they
are oral or written, DCTs present the informants with specific situations in which they have to react, either by paying a
compliment or by responding to one. It depends on the ingenuity of the researcher to come up with conversations that
elicit exactly the kind of speech act that he or she wants to investigate. Thus the researcher needs to know the kind of
situation in which this particular speech act is likely to occur. It must be clear to the researcher even before the
investigation what the nature of the speech act is. Thus the research cannot be expected to reveal new insights into the
nature of the speech act.
In fact, participants may even be too cooperative. In the experimental setting, they may be prepared to carry out
tasks and to perform speech acts that are very unlikely to occur in their real lives. Compliments pose a considerable
face-threat to the addressee since the addressee in responding is forced to violate either the maxim of modesty or the
maxim of agreement. For speakers of some languages, e.g. of Japanese, the threat may be more severe than for
speakers of other languages, e.g. of American English. They may, therefore, prefer not to put their addressees in such
an awkward position and refrain from paying compliments. However, faced with a discourse completion test, they
may still try to be cooperative and pay a compliment even if they would be unlikely to use such a compliment in
real life.
In sum, it appears that the armchair methods are particularly important to learn more about the nature of compliments,
while the field and laboratory methods are less helpful. In Section 2 above, I have distinguished between different types of
compliments, personal, ceremonious, seasonal and free gift compliments. This kind of work needs to be continued. All
other research questions presuppose a reliable identification of what a compliment is. For this purpose it is necessary, or
rather it would be necessary, to distinguish clearly between sincere compliments and empty compliments, and between
praise, flattery and compliments (see Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1989). Jucker and Taavitsainen (2000) have
introduced the concept of pragmatic space, in which they described insults against other forms of verbal aggression. In the
same way, compliments can be described in the pragmatic space of praise and commendation.
4.2. Realization patterns
The second set of questions asks for the typical patterns with which compliments are realized.
How are compliments realized? Are there typical syntactic patterns? Are there typical adjectives? Are there
other features that typically occur in compliments?
Manes and Wolfson (1981: 115) open their seminal paper on compliments with the observation that ‘‘one of the
most striking facts of compliments in American English is their almost total lack of originality’’. By this they refer
both to the syntactic patterns and to the range of adjectives that are being used in compliments. They base their claim
on data collected by the notebook method. They collected 686 compliment sequences in a large range of speech
situations in which they participated or which they observed, and they made sure that the complimenters and the
recipients of the compliments were both men and women and represented different educational and social
backgrounds.
According to their data the positive evaluation of the compliments is regularly carried by an adjective with a
positive semantic load, but only few different adjectives are used for this purpose. The two most frequent ones are nice
and good. In addition to these only three more appear regularly: beautiful, pretty and great. They also present a range
of syntactic patterns that occur regularly in their data. The following three patterns account for more than 80% of all
the syntactic patterns in their collection of compliments. In all the patterns, wavy brackets enclose alternative options
and round brackets enclose optional elements. ADJ stands for any positive adjective and ADV for any positive adverb.
PRO stands for a demonstrative or a personal pronoun. Really stands for any intensifier and the verbs need not be in
present tense. The percentage after the pattern indicates its frequency in their compliment collection. I have added
appropriate examples from the BNC to illustrate the patterns.
(25) NP {is/looks} (really) ADJ (53.6%)

‘‘Your hair looks amazing,’’ said Christina. (BNC FRS 3252-56)
(26) I (really){love/like} NP (16.1%)
‘‘I like your hair,’’ I told Ben. (BNC B7H 215-23) ‘‘And I love your dress.’’ (BNC AEO 1923-26)
(27) PRO is (really) (a) ADJ NP (14.9%)
‘‘These are very good cakes, Miss Cuthbert,’’ Mrs Allan said to Marilla. (BNC FPT 309-310)
These results have been replicated by Holmes (1988: 453, 1995: 128), who finds that the same syntactic patterns
dominate her notebook data of New Zealand compliments.
There are, however, several problems connected with this method. First, the method depends on researchers or
research assistants who spot a compliment when they see one. This may seem to be a trivial point, but in real
conversations, the researcher’s attention may momentarily be absorbed by other things and a compliment may easily
pass unnoticed. There is no possibility to go back and listen to the conversation again. It seems likely that researchers
are more alert to stereotypical compliments, and, therefore, compliments that fit their preconceived ideas of what a
compliment should look like are more likely to be included in the collection. This makes it less likely that unusual
patterns are attested in the data.
And second, the method depends on the researcher’s memory because he or she often notes down the compliment a
considerable time after the event. It is plausible to assume that they may reliably remember the general content of the
compliment but not the actual wording. Thus they may reproduce the compliment in a more stereotypical manner
than it was originally uttered. Yuan (2001: 287–288) provides empirical evidence for this. On one occasion of her
research, she interviewed two elderly ladies and tape-recorded the interaction. She also took field notes and wrote
down the compliments in the typical fashion of the notebook method. After transcribing the tape-recorded
interaction, she could analyse the differences between the field notes and the transcription, and – as her examples
show – they were quite considerable. Extracts (28) and (29) give only the translation of the interaction but not the
Chinese original.
(28) [Field note data, Respondent 82-F-O-H]

Researcher: In fact, you don’t look old at all. (You) don’t have any wrinkles on your face.
Respondent: Yeah. I just turned 49 this year. (Yuan, 2001: 288)
(29) [The actual exchange in the transcription]
Researcher: You also look very young (Particle)
Respondent: But I’ve only retired for a little over a year. I’m 49.
Researcher: Gosh, you look very young. (You) don’t have any wrinkles. (Yuan, 2001: 288)
The field notes failed to record one significant turn, and they failed to record the respondent’s information about
having retired. The compliment, which in the transcription is spread out over two turns, is merged into one in the field
notes. Yuan concludes on this basis:
It seems, then, that what can be recorded accurately in field notes are the topics of compliments and
information about interlocutors. Some supportive moves such as elaboration and explanations may fail to be
recorded in field notes through the loss of turns. In addition, the actual wording may not be totally reliable.
(Yuan, 2001: 288)
A corpus search for speech acts depends on the availability of typical conventionalized patterns for a particular
speech act. Deutschmann (2003), for instance, found that apologies regularly include expressions such as sorry,
pardon, excuse, which allow the identification of many, perhaps even most, apologies in a large computerized corpus,
such as the BNC. For compliments this is more difficult since compliments are less conventionalized than apologies.
They do not display standard illocutionary indicating devices. However, on the basis of Manes and Wolfson’s (1981)
proposed range of syntactic patterns Jucker et al. (2008) tried to formulate search strings that can be used to retrieve
compliments from a large computerized corpus. They used the BNC for this purpose.
Manes and Wolfson’s pattern (30a), for instance, was turned into the search string (30b). Extract (30c) from the
BNC gives a relevant example (Jucker et al., 2008: 279).
(30a) NP {is/looks} (really) ADJ

(30b) _NN* (isj’rejarejwerejlook*jseem*) (reallyjveryjsuchjso) _AJ0
(30c) ‘‘Your roughs look really good, Charles,’’ she told the graphic designer. (BNC A0R 1151)
The search string in (35b) seriously overgenerates and undergenerates, that is to say it produces results that are not
actually compliments and it fails to produce some strings that would actually be compliments. The search string
overgenerates because the adjective at the end of the string is not restricted to positive ones. The search string,
therefore, also retrieves cases that are clearly not compliments because the adjective has negative connotations.
The search string also undergenerates because the intensifier is required while in the original pattern it is optional.
If the intensifier is left out in search string (30b), the pattern overgenerates to such an extent that the results can no
longer be searched manually. The search string also undergenerates because both the list of linking verbs and the list
of intensifiers are limited to those that are explicitly listed. In the original pattern these lists are not restricted. Those
that are listed in the search string are the most frequent ones and it is not clear how many have been left out. And
finally, the search string undergenerates because it only allows for NPs that end in a noun (i.e. NPs that have no
postmodification).
Jucker et al. (2008) propose a range of modifications to this and all the other search strings to reach a good balance
between precision and recall. For several search strings, it was possible to hand-search all the results and pick out
those that were actually compliments. For other sets of results it was necessary to hand-search a subset and extrapolate
the frequency to the entire set.
Fig. 1. Compliment pattern frequencies in the BNC compared to Manes and Wolfson’s (1981) data (Jucker et al., 2008: 290).
On this basis, Jucker et al. (2008: 290) conclude that there are approximately 343 compliments in the 100 million-
word British National Corpus. They then compared their results with the results obtained by Manes and Wolfson
(1981) on the basis of their notebook collection of compliments. Fig. 1 compares the two sets of results. Note that
Manes and Wolfson’s pattern 4 and 6 had to be merged because they are overlapping patterns that proved to be difficult
to distinguish systematically.
It is obvious that the results obtained on the basis of search strings are very limited. The procedure only allows the
identification of patterns that have been identified in advance. It will not produce any new patterns, and obviously it is
possible that some compliments with the required patterns were missed because a pattern deviates in some small way
from the search string. It may include a discourse particle, a false start, a correction, a filled hesitation or some other
speech related phenomenon that does not basically alter the underlying pattern but that changes the sequence of
elements sufficiently in order not to be caught by the appropriate search string.
With the philological method the researcher collects the compliments in fictional data, and therefore the resulting
collection of compliments provides all the variety of possible compliments. Indeed this method does not share the
problems of precision and recall of the corpus method because the researcher can decide in each case whether a
particular utterance is a compliment or not. But it encounters the very serious problem that manual searches are liable
to be hampered by exhaustion and fatigue of the researcher and by the extremely time-consuming nature of the
process. If these restrictions are accepted, the attentive human reader can spot all types of compliments, i.e. implicit,
explicit and indirect personal compliments.
Rose (2001), for instance, compared compliments and sequences of compliments and compliment responses in 40
different movies with research results in the relevant literature, and in particular with those reported by Manes and
Wolfson (1981). He finds that the film data corresponds fairly closely to authentic data. The overall distribution of
syntactic patterns in compliments, for instance, is very similar to the one reported by Manes and Wolfson. But he finds
significant differences in the gender distribution. In his data, males are the predominant compliment givers and both
genders receive about the same number of compliments (Rose, 2001: 317). In Manes and Wolfon’s data compliments
by females to females contributed more than 50% to the overall number of compliments in their data. In Rose’s data of
film compliments this category contributed less than 10%.
In a class exercise the members of a seminar on pragmatic research methods joined forces to search for
compliments in English novels from the nineteenth and twentieth century. Each member of the class decided on one
novel and collected 20 compliments. The results of this collection are very provisional because the novels that were
searched form a very heterogeneous set, and I certainly do not want to claim that these novels use compliments in a
coherent way. But even so the search revealed many interesting patterns. Manes and Wolfson’s (1981: 115)
hypothesis about the lacking originality of compliments in American English cannot be supported on the basis of the
compliments of this collection. But the collection admittedly includes both American English and British English
literature.
While the patterns in examples (31) and (32) follow the Manes and Wolfson patterns, those in examples (33)–(35) do not.
(31) Pattern [1]: NP {is/looks} (really) ADJ

‘‘Ah,’’ she cried, ‘‘you look so cool.’’ (Fitzgerald: Great Gatsby)
(32) Pattern [3]: Pro is (really) (a) ADJ NP ‘‘Ay, marry,’’ quoth he again, ‘‘thou art a tall lad, and eke a brave one,’’
(Pyle: Robin Hood)
‘‘You’re a swell-looking young lady.’’ (Pynchon: Gravity’s Rainbow)
(33) He saw me looking with admiration at his car. (Fitzgerald: Great Gatsby)
(34) ‘‘Miss Fairfax ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl. . .I have ever met since I met you.’’
(Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest)
(35) ‘‘Come, . . . you are anxious for a compliment, so I will tell you that you have improved her. You have cured
her of her school-girl’s giggle; she really does you credit.’’ (Austen: Emma)
Extract (33) is particularly interesting because it records a non-verbal compliment. Such compliments are presumably
difficult to locate with other research methods. With the notebook method for instance, such a compliment may pass
unnoticed, unless the recipient of the compliment or some bystanders explicitly refer to this non-verbal compliment.
Extracts (34) and (35) are compliments that do not follow the patterns proposed by Manes and Wolfson. They are more
complex and defy easy classification.
Manes and Wolfson reported more than 80% of the compliments of their collection to follow one of three syntactic
patterns. The preliminary and very heterogeneous collection of compliments based on these fictional data had only
40% of compliments with these patterns, while another 40% followed patterns that were different from any of those
listed by Manes and Wolfson.
Pomerantz (1978) used a conversation analytical approach to investigate compliments and compliment responses.
For pragmaticists transcribed conversational data is usually ideal. It is untampered by the researcher, and it is language
that was used in real communicative situations. Pomerantz quotes an impressive collection of compliment sequences
from actual conversations but she does not offer any statistics on the frequencies of the different sequences and she
does not classify any syntactic patterns in her data.
Golato (2002, 2005) also uses a conversation analytical approach to investigate her data of German compliments.
Her work is based on ‘‘30 hours of non-elicited videotaped face-to-face conversations and 6 hours of audiotaped
telephone conversation between close friends and family members’’ (Golato, 2005: 24). She discusses both syntactic
and semantic features of compliment turns (2005: 73–82).
In her assessment of different research methods, Yuan (2001) also assessed the usefulness of discourse completion
tests. She administered the tests both orally and in writing. She gives a detailed description of the set-up:
The procedure of the oral DCT is this. First, the instructions as well as the 24 DCT scenarios were tape-recorded
by a male and a female native speaker, both in their early 30s, of Kunming Chinese. The male voice recorded the
12 compliment scenarios and the female voice recorded the 12 scenarios of CRs [compliment responses].
Informants were invited to the researcher’s residence individually, at a time of their choice. They listened to the
scenarios one by one and responded to each scenario orally. A second tape-recorder was kept running to record
the oral sessions in their entirety. All the recordings were done by the researcher herself. Respondents of the
written DCT questionnaire, however, were given the freedom of filling out the questionnaire at home at a time of
their convenience. No time limit was set. (Yuan, 2001: 274)
She recorded 87 subjects who filled in 24 scenarios. That means that her data consisted of 2088 compliment sequences.
In order to assess the reliability of the research method, she investigated the length of the responses (in number of
characters), and several features that she claims to be very frequent in everyday conversations, viz., exclamation particles,
repetitions, inversions, and omissions. In this way, she tried to assess the oral quality of the responses in order to compare
the written and the spoken responses. Not surprisingly, she finds that oral responses are much longer than written
responses (2001: 278). The number of exclamations, repetitions, inversions and omission all have higher frequencies in
the oral DCT data than in the written data (2001: 279). However, it is an open question whether the greater oral quality of
oral responses is a sufficient criterion to conclude that these responses are more reliable.
Billmyer (1990) also used a laboratory method to investigate the realization patterns of compliments. She
conducted a study comparing the production of compliments and compliment responses by two different groups of
ESL learners in interactions with native speakers of English. One group received formal tuition of how compliments
work in American English while the other did not. In this case the main research question actually pertained to
language acquisition. Billmyer wanted to find out whether formal tuition improved the learners’ production of
compliments and compliment responses. The participants were female speakers of Japanese who were learning
English. In monthly meetings the learners were asked to perform compliment-inducing tasks. These tasks included
showing photos of their homes and family members or teaching a proverb in their native language, or showing a piece
of clothing they had bought recently (Billmyer, 1990: 35). Thus the participants were not asked to perform
compliments as such. They were asked to perform tasks in which the researcher had good reasons to believe that
compliments would occur. Several aspects of the compliments were then compared across the two groups of learners,
including the sentence patterns, the adjectives that were used and so on.
Armchair methods do no appear to be useful tools to verify any claims about the syntactic patterns of compliments.
It is, of course, possible to speculate about possible patterns and word choices of compliments. However, it is an
empirical question whether these patterns and choices are actually used by the members of the language community
under investigation. For research questions about the patterns of compliments, therefore, armchair methods are not to
be trusted. They could perhaps be used as first approximations for empirical methods. The researcher could try to think
of prototypical compliments and then search for these patterns by using any of the field methods. But this approach
would not allow the identification of more original or unusual compliments.
In sum, Manes and Wolfson (1981) have set the research question about the realization patterns of compliments on the
agenda of compliment research. Their study was taken up by Holmes (1988, 1995), who also used the notebook method.
While Pomerantz (1978) and Golato (2005) used a conversation analytical approach, I provided some evidence for the
usefulness of the philological method. Such field methods, however, provide only limited results. No statistical
conclusions are possible since it is difficult to find enough compliments on the basis of manual searches of conversational
or fictional data. Jucker et al.’s (2008) attempt to turn Manes and Wolfson’s syntactic patterns into search strings
successfully retrieved a large number of compliments from the British National Corpus, but it does not allow the
identification of deviant realization patterns and even the frequency results are not entirely convincing. The laboratory
methods used by Yuan (2001) and by Billmyer (1990) provided interesting results but further work would be needed to
assess Manes and Wolfson’s (1981) claim about the lack of originality of compliments in American English.
4.3. Who uses compliments to whom on which occasions?
The third set of research questions asks about the demographics of the complimenter and the compliment recipient
and it asks about the situations in which compliments are most likely to occur.
Who uses compliments to whom? Are some groups of people, e.g. women, more likely to give and receive
compliments? Can we discern clear gender patterns in complimenting behaviour? Are there situations in which
compliments are particularly appropriate or inappropriate?
It was Holmes (1988, 1990, 1995) who opened up this line of research on the basis of her New Zealand data
collected with the notebook method. She focused in particular on the gender patterns and combined this with research
questions on the object of the compliments. Thus, she is not primarily interested in the surface patterns of the
compliments but in the identity of the complimenter and of the compliment recipient. A breakdown of the total of 484
compliments in her collection provides the statistics given in Table 1.
Table 1
Number of compliments according to gender of complimenter and recipient (Holmes, 1990: 266, see also 1988: 449, 1995: 123).
Complimenter–recipient Number %
Female–Female 248 51.2
Female–Male 80 16.5
Male–Female 112 23.2
Male–Male 44 9.1
Total 484 100
Table 2
Compliment sequences collected by female and male collectors (percentages given in paranthesis).
Collector F–F F–M M–F M–M Total
Female 100 (56.5) 24 (13.6) 42 (23.7) 11 (6.2) 177 (100.0)
Male 8 (10.8) 19 (25.7) 15 (20.3) 32 (43.2) 74 (100.0)
108 (43.0) 43 (17.1) 57 (22.7) 43 (17.1) 251 (100.0)
According to this table women are far more likely to receive compliments than men. They received almost 75% of
all the compliments in the collection. Holmes also found that women use a syntactic form which strengthens the
positive force of the compliment significantly more often than men do, whereas men use a form which attenuates or
hedges on compliment force significantly more often than women do. Women compliment each other on appearance
more than on any other topic, while compliments on possessions are used significantly more often between males. And
compliments to those of different status tend to focus on skills or performance (Holmes, 1988, 1990, 1995).
However, it has to be noted, as Holmes (1988: 450) points out, that the majority of the compliment collectors was
also female. This clearly had an effect on the compliments they collected. A breakdown of the compliments according
to collector suggests that the effect still survives for both male and female collectors. But there was not enough data
collected by male researchers to confirm this suggestion.
In a small-scale class exercise, eight female researchers and four male researchers collected a total of 251
compliments. Table 2 records the compliment dyads that they collected.
In spite of the limited scope of this class exercise, a very clear pattern emerges. The collectors of both genders
collected the highest percentage of compliments in same-sex dyads of their own gender, and the second highest
percentage in dyads in which their own gender was the recipient, i.e. for female collectors the most frequently
represented dyad turned out to be female complimenter and female recipient, and the second most frequent dyad
turned out to be male complimenter and female recipient. It seems likely, therefore, that compliments received by the
collector influenced these results. About 80% of all compliments collected by female collectors had female recipients,
and about 70% of those collected by male collectors had male recipients. The distribution is statistically relevant
(chi-square 71.83, d.f. 3, p < 0.0001).
Cordella et al. (1995) also use the notebook method to compare compliments in Australian English and in Spanish.
They collected 148 Australian English compliments and 40 Spanish ones. They followed the pattern set by Manes and
Wolfson (1981) but in their case only three female researchers collected the compliments. While the group of
Australian English complimenters and compliment recipients was relatively homogeneous, the group of Spanish
participants consisted of speakers of Spanish of different nationalities. They came from Uruguay, Chile and Argentina,
and the majority of them had lived in Australia for more than 15 years.
Cordella et al. (1995: 239) record a predominance of compliments by female complimenters and female recipients,
but they also note that this may be a result of the gender of the collectors. In the majority of cases, apparently, the
collectors were also the recipients of the recorded compliment. They also found evidence for what Wolfson (1988:
132) has called the bulge theory, i.e. the observation that speech behavior on the cline from intimates to complete
strangers call for similar behavior at the end points of the scale and for markedly different behavior in the middle.
Compliments, therefore, are most frequent among friends, and they are less frequent both for intimates and strangers.
Pomerantz (1978) and Golato (2005) both used a conversation analytical approach to investigate compliments and
compliment responses but in spite of the great number of examples that they quote, they do not offer demographics on
the participants or any statistics on the frequencies of the different sequences and therefore their data do not allow any
generalisations about who compliments whom in which specific situation.
As argued above, a corpus search may retrieve a range of compliment sequences that are realized with
conventionalized syntactic and lexical patterns but to date the method is not powerful enough to retrieve enough
compliments in order to allow a meaningful analysis of the demographics of complimenters and compliment recipients.
The fictional world used in the philological method has an existence independent of the researcher. This means that
the researcher does not have to fear that his or her personality influences the numbers and types of compliments that he
or she encounters. In the notebook method, collectors may find it more difficult to collect compliments outside of their
own gender, social class, or age group. Such restrictions do not apply in the case of a philological search. It is relatively
easy to compile all the compliments that occur in the fictional world of a novel and to establish the personal profiles of
the complimenters and the recipients. But this procedure will tell us very little beyond the fictional world in which
these compliments occur.
In the laboratory method, the researcher sets up the situation according to specific distributions of speaker roles.
Discourse completion tests, for instance, usually take great care to describe the situations in which they want the
informant to provide an appropriate utterance, and a researcher who wants his or her informants to role-play a scene
also takes great care to describe the situations which the informants are supposed to improvise. Thus the researcher
specifies in advance who compliments whom, where and when. These methods, therefore, cannot provide any results
on the demographics of complimenters and compliment recipients and it cannot tell us anything about where and when
compliments are actually used, but they can tell us who considers which compliment appropriate in which type of
situation.
Philosophers can speculate about the nature of a compliment, about the difference between sincere and insincere
compliments, for instance, but speculations about who pays compliments and who receives them in which situation
seem to be very unreliable. Obviously speakers have everyday experiences and intuitions about such matters, but
researchers need more reliable empirical investigations for such questions.
A researcher can ask informants about when and where and to whom they pay compliments or from whom they
receive compliments. It is difficult to assess the reliability of answers to such questions. They are certainly not
empirical in the sense that they would answer these questions in any straightforward way. But the answers may
nevertheless be interesting because they tell us something about native speaker perceptions of compliments. If a large
number of informants is interviewed a pattern may emerge of popular beliefs about this topic. As long as the popular
beliefs are not mistaken for the empirical facts of who actually uses compliments for whom and on what situations,
they may be interesting and worthy of investigation.
The questions about the complimenters and the compliment recipients have typically been asked with the help of
the notebook method, e.g. by Holmes (1988, 1995) or by Cordella et al. (1995). This is not unproblematic since the
gender of the researcher and compliment collector influences the statistics of who pays compliments to whom. But if a
research team manages to control this variable, e.g. by an equal number of male and female collectors, this method
appears to be more reliable than any of the others in answering this particular set of questions.
4.4. Object of compliment
A compliment always involves some object or good on which the compliment recipient is complimented. Much of
the research on compliments has been devoted to this aspect.
What do speakers compliment on? Are there entities or ‘‘goods’’ that are more often complimented on than others?
Normally, such questions are not asked in isolation but in connection with other research questions. Holmes (1988,
1995), for instance, combines the question about the object of the compliment with the question about who pays and
receives the compliment.
It was again Holmes (1988, 1995) with her notebook method who pioneered research on this question. She found,
for instance, that 61% of all compliments between women relate to appearance while only 36% of the compliments
between males relate to appearance. Table 3 summarizes the results.
Cordella et al. (1995) also used the notebook method to compare compliments in Australian English and in Spanish.
Their main research question deals with the identity of the complimenter and the compliment receiver. But they also
Table 3
Interaction between compliment topic and sex of participants, percentages given in paranthesis (Holmes, 1988: 455; 1995: 132).
Topic F–F M–F F–M M–M
Appearance 151 (61) 53 (47) 32 (40) 16 (36)
Ability/performance 50 (20) 49 (44) 28 (35) 14 (32)
Possessions 30 (12) 2 (2) 9 (11) 11 (25)
Personality/friendship 10 (4) 5 (4) 81 (10) 2 (5)
Other 7 (3) 3 (3) 3 (4) 1 (2)
Total 248 112 80 44
investigate the object of the compliment. They distinguish between three types of objects; appearance, possession and
skill. The following extracts give relevant examples (Cordella et al., 1995: 245–246):
(36) (Neighbour (62) to her friend’s daughter (17))

A: You look very nice. Is that a new dress you’re wearing? Are you going somewhere?
B: No, we’re just having a little get together at home.
(37) (Female friend to a male friend)
A: When did you get it? (indicating a car)
B: Last week.
A: I like it!
(38) (Male friend to female friend of similar age) Hello X, how are your studies going? I suppose you won’t stop
until you become a Professor . . .
On the basis of their collection of compliments, they reach the following conclusion:
The general trend shown by these data is for recipients younger than 30 years to receive compliments concerning
appearance while recipients older than 30 are more likely to receive compliments related to skills. (Cordella
et al., 1995: 245)
To some extent the method seems to be suited to the research question. It allows statistics on the different types of
objects that people compliment on. But the method still has the problem that the identity of the compliment collector
(who often turned out to be the compliment recipient) influences the results of this research. The compliments were
largely collected by the three authors of the paper.
The conversation analytical approach used by Pomerantz (1978) does not offer any statistics on the frequencies of the
different sequences and therefore her data do not allow any generalisations about the object of compliments. Golato
(2005), who also uses a conversation analytical approach to investigate her data of German compliments, discusses the
topic of the compliments very briefly. In her data collected among family and friends, 37% of all compliments related to
food and drink, while the others deal with appearance, ability, behaviour and possessions (Golato, 2005: 83).
In the case of this research question, too, the number of compliments that can be retrieved on the basis of a corpus
search is too limited. They do not allow a meaningful analysis of the type of objects that are the subject of
compliments. The laboratory methods, likewise, do not seem suitable for this research question. The researcher has to
specify in advance what he or she wants the informants to compliment on, and therefore no results on the most likely
object of compliments can be expected. And it seems unlikely that philosophers can speculate reliably about the
objects which are more likely or less likely to receive a compliment. This also rules out the interview method.
Thus, it is mainly the notebook method which promises useful insights into the objects of compliments, but it is
necessary to control for the social profile of the compliment collector. The research quoted above has shown that men
and women tend to compliment on different objects. It is very plausible to assume that similar differences exist
between complimenters of different age or different social status. It has also been shown that male and female
compliment collectors are likely to hear and collect compliment sequences of different gender dyads, and, therefore,
they are likely to collect compliments on different objects. In the extant literature it is mostly young academics who
have collected compliments with the notebook method, and for this presumably rather homogeneous group, gender
seems to be the most significant differentiating factor. It is to be expected that compliment collectors of different age
groups and of different social classes would also be likely to bring back rather different collections of compliments.
4.5. Compliment responses
A large amount of research on compliments is actually devoted to compliment responses.

How do the recipients of compliments react when they receive a compliment?
A compliment typically poses a politeness problem for the recipients. Accepting the compliment may appear to be
immodest, declining the compliment, on the other hand, may appear to be an impolite disagreement with the
complimenter or perhaps also insincere. It is, therefore, an interesting question to find out how people differ in the way
they deal with this problem. Pomerantz (1978) is an early and classic study in this area. She works within a
conversation analytical model and uses extracts from actual conversations as illustrations of the categorization of
compliment responses that she develops, but she does not give any information on the extension and composition of
her data or on her data retrieval methods. It was presumably her intimate familiarity with the data that allowed her to
find relevant extracts. On the basis of her data she develops a taxonomy of compliment responses and she uses this to
account for the way in which speakers resolve the conflict between agreeing with the compliment and avoiding self-
praise.
Her taxonomy distinguishes the following categories (Pomerantz, 1978: 83–106):
1. Acceptances
Appreciation tokens (thank you, thanks, well thank you)
Agreements (I liked her too)
2. Rejections
Disagreements (Do you really think so? It’s just a rag my sister gave me.)
3. Self-praise avoidance
Praise downgrades
Agreement (That’s beautiful. – Isn’t it pretty?)
Disagreement (Good shot. – Not very solid though.)
Referent shifts
Reassignment (You’re a very good rower, Honey – These are very easy to row.)
Return (Ya’ sound real nice. – Yeah, you soun’ real good too.)
This approach is criticized by Herbert (1989: 11), who argues that this approach fails to provide an indication of the
relative frequency of the various types of compliment responses.
Distributional facts are essential to a satisfying treatment of CR behavior, i.e. a taxonomy of forms is merely the
prerequisite to a sociolinguistic analysis. (Herbert, 1989: 11)
He and his students used the notebook method to collect compliments in American English and in South African
English and on that basis he sets up a similar taxonomy. The American collection consists of 1062 compliment
sequences and the South African collection of 493 sequences (Herbert, 1989: 9). In contrast to Pomerantz, Herbert can
provide statistics on the frequency of the different types of responses.
Table 4 shows that South African speakers of English are more likely to agree to a compliment than American
English speakers. In particular the category ‘‘comment acceptance’’ is more frequent. In the collection of South
Table 4
Frequency of response type (in %) (Herbert, 1989: 19, 21; slightly simplified).
American South African
Agreements
Appreciation tokens 29 33
Comment acceptance 7 43
Comment history 19 5
Reassignment 3 5
Return 7 2
Total 65 88
Non-agreements
Scale down 5 6
Disagreement 10 0
Qualification 7 2
Question 5 2
No acknowledgement 5 0
Total 32 10
Request interpretation 3 1
African English compliments 43% of all the responses fell into this category. Extracts (39) and (40) illustrate the most
important agreement categories, ‘‘appreciation tokens’’ and ‘‘comment acceptance’’, and extract (41) illustrates the
non-agreement category ‘‘scale down’’.
(39) Thank you. (Herbert, 1989: 11)

(40) F1: I like your hair long.
F2: Me too. I’m never getting it cut short again. (Herbert, 1989: 12)
(41) F1: Your hair looks good today.
F2: Oh, it’s just the same old thing. (Herbert, 1989: 15)
Herbert (1989: 21) mentions that some of the differences in the figures may be due to differences in recording
accuracy. Indeed this method depends on researchers or research teams working on the different language varieties
who apply exactly the same criteria when collecting and analysing the data.
Holmes (1988, 1995) also used notebook data to set up her taxonomy of compliment responses. She provides the
following taxonomy (Holmes, 1988: 460, 1995: 141):
Accept
Appreciation/agreement token
Thanks, yes
Agreeing utterance
I think it’s lovely, too.
Downgrading/qualifying utterance
It’s not too bad is it.
Return compliment
You’re looking good too.
Reject
Disagreeing utterance
I’m afraid I don’t like it much.
Question accuracy
Is beautiful the right word?
Challenge sincerity
You don’t really mean that.
Deflect/evade
Shift credit
My mother knitted it.
Informative comment
I bought it at the Vibrant Knits place.
Ignore
It’s time we were leaving isn’t it?
Legitimate evasion
Context needed to illustrate
Request reassurance/repetition
Do you really think so?
Herbert’s (1989) contrastive dimension was taken up by Chen (1993) and Schneider and Schneider (2000). Chen
compared speakers of American English and speakers of Chinese, while Schneider and Schneider replicated his study
with data from speakers of American English, Irish English, German and Chinese. Both Chen (1993) and Schneider and
Schneider (2000) collected their data with the help of a discourse completion test consisting of four different situations
that cover the compliments on looks, clothes, achievements and possessions. Extracts (42) and (43) give typical situations
of the discourse completion test (Chen, 1993: 70; also reproduced by Schneider and Schneider, 2000: 80):
Fig. 2. Compliment responses in Chinese, American English, Irish English and German (based on Schneider and Schneider, 2000: 74).
(42) You meet an acquaintance you haven’t seen for some time. After an exchange of greetings, s/he says: ‘‘You
look so nice! Even nicer than when I saw you last’’. To this, you reply:
(43) You have given a presentation in your biology class. After the presentation, one of your classmates comes to
you and says: ‘‘That was a great presentation. I really enjoyed it’’. You reply:
The questionnaire then provides four answer slots which the informants can fill with appropriate answers.
The language groups were represented by 50 students each. On the basis of his data, Chen (1993) concludes that for
speakers of Chinese the modesty maxim (Leech, 1983) is more important while for speakers of American English the
maxim of agreement takes precedence.
Schneider and Schneider (2000) added two groups of 50 students from Dublin and from Hamburg in order to
compare compliment responses in four different cultures; Chinese, American English, Irish English and German.
They can show considerable differences between the four groups of speakers. Fig. 2 summarizes their results.
The differences between the American English, Irish English and German speakers are not very big, but the
speakers of Chinese clearly behave very differently. Schneider and Schneider (2000) then merged the categories
‘‘refuse’’, ‘‘reject’’ and ‘‘irony’’ into the superstrategy following the modesty or politeness maxim, while the
categories ‘‘accept’’, ‘‘return’’ and (with some hesitations) ‘‘deflect/evade’’ are merged into the superstrategy
following the agreement maxim. On that basis the cultural differences become even clearer, as Fig. 3 shows.
The differences between the four cultures are very significant. Speakers of American English opt for the modesty
maxim in just about a quarter of all cases. In three quarters of the cases they opt for the agreement maxim. Speakers of
Chinese opt for the reverse. Only 20% opt for the agreement maxim, all others for modesty.
Lorenzo-Dus (2001) also carried out cross-cultural research on compliment responses with discourse completion
tests. She compared British English and Peninsular Spanish university students. The analysis of the compliment
responses was based on Herbert’s (1989) taxonomy. The set-up of the discourse situations took into consideration the
power differential between the fictional complimenter and compliment recipient of the discourse completion test.
There were an equal number of situations with the complimenter in the superior position, the recipient in the superior
Fig. 3. Modesty versus agreement in compliment responses in speakers of American English, German, Irish English and Chinese (based on
Schneider and Schneider, 2000: 75).
Table 5
Response types by untutored and tutored learners of English (Billmyer, 1990: 42).
Untutored Tutored
Accept (Thanks, agree) 27 (43.6%) 18 (25.7%)
Deflect (Comment, shift credit, return, downgrade, question) 10 (16.1%) 47 (67.2%)
Reject (Deny, ignore, disagree) 25 (40.3%) 5 (7.1%)
position, or with power symmetry between the two. The results revealed – among other things – that the British
students were more likely than their Spanish counterparts to question the sincerity of the compliment; they were also
more likely to respond with irony or humour to the compliments (Lorenzo-Dus, 2001: 113).
Thus the method allows the collection and comparison of data across cultures. It is, of course, artificial to ask
informants to write down what they would normally say. The data may be more stereotypical than the reality.
However, it is also possible that the situations are not equally likely across the cultures. Speakers of American
English might be much more forthcoming to pay each other a compliment because they can anticipate that it is not
very difficult for the recipient to accept the compliment. The conflict between the modesty maxim and the
agreement maxim is not experienced as a very serious one. For speakers of Chinese, on the other hand, this conflict
might be much more serious, and, therefore, the speakers might hesitate to put each other in such an uncomfortable
situation. It might be easier, and perhaps even politer, not to pay a compliment. The method of the discourse
completion test ignores such difficulties and presents the situations to speakers of different cultures as if they were
exactly the same.
In chapter 6 of her book, Golato (2005) compares her own conversation analytical data to the taxonomy and
the data by Pomerantz (1978). She finds that Germans display the same response types as the Americans but that
the Germans produce fewer rejections and disagreements (Golato, 2005: 193). This stands in direct contrast
to the findings by Schneider and Schneider (2000), who claim that Americans produce fewer rejections than the
Germans.
Billmyer (1990) used role-plays to compare complimenting behaviour of native and non-native speakers of
English. Among the aspects of the compliments that she investigated she also looked at the type of response given to
the compliments. She obtained the results given in Table 5.
It has to be remembered that the groups of learners were female speakers of Japanese. It is obvious that the formal
tuition of the nature of American English compliments had a significant impact on the performance (a chi square test
shows that the difference between the two groups is significant at the 5% level). The untutored group relied mostly on
simple acceptance or rejection of the compliment (thank you, yes or no, that’s not true) while the tutored group made
use of a variety of deflecting strategies.
In sum, for this research question a large range of methods has been used by the different researchers. Pomerantz
(1978) pioneered the work on responses to compliments with conversation analytical methods. Herbert (1989), who
adopted her taxonomy, used the notebook method to investigate compliment responses contrastively. Holmes
(1988, 1995) also used the notebook method to investigate compliments and compliment responses. She wanted to
find out about gender differences in complimenting behaviour. Billmyer (1990) used role-plays for her
investigation of compliments in second language acquisition. Chen (1993) and Schneider and Schneider (2000)
used discourse completion tests to find cross-cultural differences in complimenting behaviour, and Golato (2003)
uses conversation analytical methods again to investigate compliments in her corpus of German conversations.
Thus the field method of conversation analysis turns out to be the method of choice for researchers who concentrate
on one language. This method has the advantage of providing real language that has not been hampered by the
research design. On the other hand, in many natural conversations compliments are not very frequent. It is,
therefore, difficult and time consuming to compile a sufficient collection of compliments on this basis, and it is
extremely difficult to make the collection big enough for statistically convincing results. With the notebook method
and with the laboratory methods, on the other hand, it is relatively easy to collect large numbers of compliment
sequences. With the laboratory methods, it is even possible to control the relevant variables, at the cost, of course,
of the naturalness of the data.
5. Conclusion
The ideal research method for the investigation of speech acts, and in particular for the investigation of
compliments, does not exist. There is not even a method that is in a general way better than all the others. In this paper,
I have argued that an assessment of a particular method always depends on the specific research question that the
researcher tries to answer because the different methods vary enormously in their suitability for specific research
questions. One particular method may provide interesting results for one specific question or set of questions while it is
of little value for another set of questions.
Thus, I fundamentally disagree with Manes and Wolfson’s assurance about their notebook method, which they call
‘‘ethnographic approach’’:
It is our conviction that an ethnographic approach is the only reliable method for collecting data about the way
compliments, or indeed, any other speech act function in everyday interactions. (Manes and Wolfson, 1981: 115)
I have categorized the different research methods on the basis of the distinction proposed by Clark and Bangerter
(2004), who proposed the terms ‘‘armchair’’, ‘‘field’’ and ‘‘laboratory’’ for three types of research methods on the basis
of the prototypical locations in which they are carried out. It is typical for many linguists to propose one of these
methods as the only reliable method for linguistic research and to exclude all the others. In this paper, I have taken the
view that all the three methods and the subtypes that I have introduced have their intrinsic values but all of them are
limited in the types of research questions that they can tackle.
I am not proposing that every researcher who wants to investigate compliments has to employ all the research methods
proposed above in order to get a comprehensive picture. Instead I want to argue that researchers should adopt a more
modest attitude in their discussion of the chosen research method. The methods of their choice may be the best possible
for the very specific research question that they are asking but other methods are equally valid for different questions.
The methods also differ in the generalisations that they allow. It is an essential part of academic argumentation to
generalise results and to claim a wider application of one’s findings than just the specific examples or sets of examples
that have been analyzed. However, such generalisations often need to be more modest, too. Fictional data, for instance,
is usually shunned by linguists because the findings based on fictional data cannot be generalised to everyday natural
conversations. It is true that such a generalisation is not possible. But if linguists and pragmaticists turn their interest
from their narrow focus on everyday natural conversation to language use in general, all instances of language use have
to be seen as situated. The totality of language use is made up of many different varieties and subvarieties of spoken
and written language. They all have to be seen within their special conditions and limitations, and research results
based on one variety should not be generalised too easily to other varieties.
Acknowledgements
This paper has its origin in a seminar that I taught at the University of Zurich in the spring semester 2008 under the
title ‘‘Speech Act Theory and Pragmatic Research: The Case of Compliments’’. In this seminar we tried out the
different methods of data collection and data analysis that have so far been proposed in the relevant literature on
compliments. I thank all the members of this seminar for their cooperation, for the lively discussions and for all their
critical questions. On many occasions they insisted on opinions that differed from mine. I learnt a lot in my attempts
to stand my corner and defend my own positions about the value of individual research methods and other matters.
I also thank Daniela Landert for a lot of help in the preparation of this paper. My thanks also go to Klaus P. Schneider
and to two anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Pragmatics whose comments and suggestions improved this paper
very considerably. Needless to say that any remaining shortcomings are my own. An earlier version of this paper was
realized as a hypertext in an online festschrift for Gerd Fritz. The current linear version of this paper is also dedicated
to him.
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Speech Act Research Between Armchair, Field and Laboratory The Case of Compliments

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Speech Act Research Between Armchair, Field and Laboratory The Case of Compliments

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Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1611–1635

Speech act research between armchair, field and laboratory

Keywords: Speech acts; Research methods; Compliments; Politeness

E-mail address: ahjucker@es.uzh.ch.

2.1. Personal compliments

(4) I wish I could play the piano like you do.

2.2. Ceremonious compliments

2.3. Season compliments and free gift compliments

3. Armchair, field and laboratory

3.1. The armchair method

3.2. The field method

(20) A: What did he say?

3.3. The laboratory method

(22) In a crowded non-smoking compartment

4.1. Nature of compliments

(24) You have put on weight.

4.2. Realization patterns

(25) NP {is/looks} (really) ADJ (53.6%)

(28) [Field note data, Respondent 82-F-O-H]

(30a) NP {is/looks} (really) ADJ

(31) Pattern [1]: NP {is/looks} (really) ADJ

4.3. Who uses compliments to whom on which occasions?

4.4. Object of compliment

(36) (Neighbour (62) to her friend’s daughter (17))

4.5. Compliment responses

A large amount of research on compliments is actually devoted to compliment responses.

(39) Thank you. (Herbert, 1989: 11)

BNC: British National Corpus, accessed via https://es-bncweb.unizh.ch/.

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