The Study of Compliment Speech Act Responses: A Study Based on Status and Gender in Persian

The present study aimed at extracting and categorizing the range of strategies used in responding to compliments in Persian regarding the relative status of compliments and complimentary. Another purpose of the study was to provide a contrastive view of compliment responses between Persian and English languages. 60 Iranian Persian and 12 Canadian English speaking university students attended in this study. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was used to extract the strategies employed when responding to compliments by Persian and English speakers. The corpus used in this analysis consists of 809 Persian and English compliment responses collected from the participants of the study. 655 compliment responses from the Iranian participants and 154 compliment responses from the Canadian participants were collected. Findings suggest that, in responding to a compliment, the general tendency of Persian speakers is an “agreement”, both in equal and unequal status. Further, comparing the results of Persian and English data, significant differences were observed.