A Sociolinguistic Study of Compliment Responses among Farsi Speakers: Focusing on Age and Gender

As two of the most vital components for any communication, speech conventions and complement responses (CRs) offer a fruitful site for investigating how stable a communication is among different groups of speakers. Drawing on Holmes’ three-way classification of CRs, this study attempted to investigate CRs among female and male as well as young and middle-aged Farsi speakers. In this study a DC with four situational settings relating to four different topics (appearance, character, ability and possession) was given to participants to identify their CRs pattern. Participants of the study were a total of 32 subjects. 16 male native speakers of Farsi and 16 female native speakers of Farsi. From the male group 8 of them were young (from 15 to 30) and 8 of them middle-aged (45 to 75).The findings pointed to the fact that CRs pattern was not considerably different neither among female and male speakers nor among young and middle-aged speakers. This may be due to the fact that CR pattern is shaped irrespective of gender and age and social factors are much more influential in communication and they are often closely intertwined. The findings promised implications for familiarizing students with conversational norms and rhetorics to prevent pragmatics failure.