چکیده:
This paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the Persian native speakers. 200 Persian respondents took a 24-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated in. The results suggested a significant effect for the treated intervening social variables of age, gender, educational background, social distance, and relative power as well as compliment topics in determining the type of compliment response. The responses were further suggestive of the contextual effects of the three systems of hierarchical, solidarity and deferential as well as a newly coined system as kinship system.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The results suggested a significant effect for the treated intervening social variables of age, gender, educational background, social distance, and relative power as well as compliment topics in determining the type of compliment response.
In contributing to such growing body of knowledge in Persian, Boori (1994), based on a corpus of 838 compliment events, suggested that in response to compliments, Persian speakers employed the following 18 response types: (1) Appreciation token, (2) Appreciation token plus a politeness formula, (3) Appreciation token plus comment/reassignment, (4) Non-verbal acceptance, (5) Comment acceptance, (6) Comment, (7) Offering, (8) Praise upgrade, (9) Comment history, (10) Reassignment, (11) Return, (12) Entreaty, (13) Scale down, (14) Question, (15) Disagreement, (16) Qualification, (17) No acknowledgement and (18) Request interpretation.
24 items were developed around the earlier recognized most frequent compliment topics of possession, skill/ performance, appearance, and personality traits as well as controlling social distance (either close or distant) and relative power (equal, low or high).
(Do I give it to you?) In the next stage of data analysis, each compliment response was placed in one of Chiang and Pochtrager’s (1993) categories: acceptance, positive elaboration, neutral elaboration, negative elaboration, and denial.
The assumptions of unequal power status and distant relations of the hierarchical politeness system set the ground for the respondents to suggest acceptance, negative elaboration and comment history major and minor response categories.