Compliments and Compliment Responses among Palestinian EFL University Learners: A Sociolinguistic Study

Abstract

This study investigates compliments and compliment responses from a sociolinguistic perspective as realized by forty Palestinian EFL university learners. The investigation focused on identifying how the participants perform compliments and compliment responses in English. Moreover, it addressed the asymmetries in this field among male and female participants. The researchers created a discourse completion task (DCT) to collect data. The collected data were analyzed based on the analytical framework of Yuan (2002) of compliment strategies and the analytical framework of Herbert (1990) of compliment responses strategies.  The findings of the study show that Palestinian EFL university learners tend to perform explicit compliments more than other compliment strategies. The learners also tend to accept compliments more than reject them. Besides, there are no significant gender asymmetries among Palestinian EFL university learners in terms of how they perform compliments and compliment responses. Finally, the findings reveal that social status does not affect the way Palestinian EFL university learners express and respond to compliments.