Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By Narjes Ziaei
Abstract
I. Introduction
Despite the fact that linguists have treated the first and the second pair
parts independently, complimenting and responding to compliments are
two intimately linked acts. Both function as negotiating solidarity. The
primary function of compliments in everyday conversation, according to
most analysts, is social; although they can serve a variety of functions,
their purpose is to establish, negotiate, maintain, or consolidate social
solidarity (Manes and Wolfson 1981, Holmes (1988), Herbert 1990,
Johnson and Roen 1992).
2. I (really) like/love NP
The first pattern covered 53.6% of the compliments in the corpus; the
second and third accounted for 16.1% and 14.9%, respectively. Wolfson
and Manes also found that only two verbs like and love, accounted for
86% of the positively evaluative verbs. Moreover, it was found that five
positive evaluative adjectives- nice, good, beautiful, pretty, and great
accounted for two-thirds of the adjectives used, the two most common
ones being nice (22.5%) and good (19.6%).
Compliment responses
Compliment events
Compliment events were, for ease of reference, classified into four classes
depending on their content.
Che muhat khoshgel shode! How pretty your hair has become!
Aqa jun cheqadr mehrabun-i! Dear grandpa, how kind you are!
III. Results
Compliments are expression of positive evaluation; a speaker wishes to
"make hearer feel good" (Goody 1978) through expressing that he (the
hearer) has a certain positive feature. This positive evaluation may be
semantici.e. through words like adjectives or verbs or syntactic
through structural markers such as what, how. For example, "You've got a
nice coat" owes its positive load to the adjective nice, while what a
fountain pen! has a marker for its positive load. Almost all the
compliments in the corpus (gathered translations from different books and
from numerous translation students) are semantically loaded (93.7%),
and this semantic load is found to generally be adjectival (83.5%). It is
mainly adjectives that provide semantic load in the four content areas.
(nice)
Shik 35 _ _ 1 36 4.3 5.1
(handsome)
Khub 22 57 26 8 113 13.5 16.1
(good)
Khoshrang 19 _ _ 1 20 2.4 2.9
(nice-
colored)
Khoshgel 16 _ _ 32 48 5.7 6.9
(pretty)
Tamiz 15 _ _ _ 16 1.9 2.3
(clean)
Khoshmaze 1 21 _ _ 22 2.6 3.1
(delicious)
Khoshsaliqe 1 2 6 _ 9 1 1.3
(tasteful)
Mehraban _ _ 5 _ _ .6 .7
(kind)
Khoshtip 1 _ _ 23 24 2.9 3.4
(smart)
Syntactic analysis
NP (kheili/very) ADJ/ADV V.
Compliment responses
IV. Conclusion
Sociolinguistics is a new branch of study which came into life through the
amalgamation of the sciences of sociology and linguistics. Linguistics
studies a language regardless of the person, the group, or the society
which speak the language, but sociolinguistics studies a language in
relation to people in a group or a society. In the past, for becoming a
translator, learning rules of grammar and vocabulary was considered
enough but now, in addition to grammar and vocabulary, rules of use are
also regarded to be important and essential. A specific high-frequency
structure/word n the source language should be translated to a structure
/word occurring with a fairly similar frequency in the target language.
When we encounter them to translate them appropriately, it is clear that
we need good mastery of the two sides.
V. References
Holmes, J., and Brown, D., (1987). Teachers and students learning about
compliments. TESOL Quarterly 21:523-460
Levinson, S.C. (1980). Speech act theory: The state of the art. Language
and linguistics Abstracts 13/1:5-24