COMPLIMENT-BLAME RELATION AND RESPONSES

Compliment and blame are rhetorical devices that people use to evaluate other people s behaviours as well as to motivate and educate them to act according to moral norms of their society. Yet, these speech acts can be used to express someone’s attitudes towards the addressee. Whereas compliment is implemented to denote admiration and approval, blame is used to denote disapproval and criticism. The main objective of this study is to study these two speech acts and to show how one of them can be expressed by means of the other because a lot of studies have been done on compliment and compliment responses without shedding light on its relation with blame.The study consists of four sections and conclusions. The first section presents an introduction to the study. The second and third sections deal with compliment and blame from a theoretical viewpoint. The fourth section is devoted to the practical side of the study. To attain the aims of the study, the researcher has designed a questionnaire containing 20 questions and information about participants such as grade and gender. The questionnaire is distributed to 40 students of department of English at Al-Muthanna university: 20 from second year and 20 from fourth year: 10 males and 10 females in each stage to show variation in participants uses of compliment and blame according to their stage and gender. Finally, the study ends with the most important conclusions it reaches at.