‘‘Was that a compliment?’’ Implicit compliments in English and Spanish  

Oleh:

Maiz-Arevalo, Carmen

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 44 no. 08 (2012), page 980-996.
Topik: Implicit compliments; Pragmatic motivations; Spanish; English
Fulltext: Maiz-Arevalo_C.pdf (322.84KB)

Isi artikel

Compliments are certainly one of the most widely studied speech acts, as shown by the extensive literature devoted to the topic. However, as pointed out by different authors, research has almost exclusively focused on formulaic compliments while neglecting implicit ones, most probably because the first tend to outnumber the latter. The present paper is an attempt to redress the balance in favor of implicit compliments. My focus, however, is not on the interpretive procedures employed by interlocutors when receiving an implicit compliment but on the pragmatic motives underlying the speaker's choice of this much rarer speech act. Thus, this paper aims to answer the following research question: What are the speaker's pragmatic motivations to opt for an implicit instead of an explicit compliment? Results show that implicit compliments are preferred when evaluating someone's qualities, achievements or personal appearance in order to avoid face-threat, especially when the relationship between the interlocutors is still distant. Finally, it can also be argued that not all implicit compliments share the same degree of implicitness. In fact, some of them show recurrent linguistic patterns which lead to us argue in favor of a cline of explicitness both in English and Spanish.

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