Course- Pragmatics

Submit the Worksheets at the end of class for all the research article presented and discussed by your
class. Also complete one worksheet for your own topic.

Name: Compliments and Compliment Responses in Film: Implications for Pragmatics Research and
Language Teaching

Topic Sumayyah Malik

Presenters Tehreem Wali

Problem The verbal means of expressing politeness in the forms of address, opening and
closing formulae, the degree of directness, and the amount of syntactic,
lexical/phrasal and external modification used in the WhatsApp requests employed
by Mexican Spanish speakers.

Objectives 1. This paper explores the viability of film as a resource for pragmatics research
and language teaching by analyzing a corpus of compliments and compliments
collected from forty American feature films.
2. To establish the validity of language used in film, the film data is compared with
naturally-occurring compliments and compliment responses from existing studies
for features such as syntactic formula, adjective choice, gender distribution in
giving compliments, compliment topic, and choice of compliment response
strategy.
Related Literature Allan (1985), Altman (1988), Cooper, Lavery and Rinvolucri (1991), Lonergan
(1984), Stempleski and Arcario (1992), Stempleski and Tomalin (1990),
Summerfield (1993), Salzmann (1989), Manes and Wolfson (1981), Saville-
Troike (1989), Beebe and Cummings (1996), McHoul (1987), Kachru (1991a,
1991b, 1992), Nelson (1991) and D’Souza (1991), Labov (1972)
Findings and 1. Table 1 displays the results for syntactic formula in compliments (n=408)
Results compared with results for M and W’s corpus of naturally-occurring
compliments. The table indicates that although there are some slight
differences between the two corpora, the distribution of syntactic formula
for the two corpora is strikingly similar. The most obvious difference is the
lower frequency of the second compliment formula (a difference of almost
ten points), and the higher frequency of syntactic patterns other than the top
nine in the film data (a difference of almost fourteen points).
2. Table 2 displays the findings for adjective choice, again comparing the film
compliments to those collected by M and W. Differences here were far
greater, with the film data evidencing a wider range of adjectives in
adjectival compliments. While the M and W corpus revealed a more
limited range of adjective choice – the top five adjectives accounting for
close to 70% of the data – this is not the case for adjectives in film
compliments, where the top five accounted for less than half of the data. In
fact, there is even considerable discrepancies in the frequencies of each of
the five adjectives (e.g., far higher frequency of nice in M and W than in
films.)
Recommendations Studies on a broader level, comprised of larger corpora, can be conducted to
generalize the phenomenon of politeness in the WhatsApp conversation between
Mexican speakers.

Future Research The examination of other whatsapp groups with other communicative purposes and
comprising members of different generations, genders, and social relationships
would be necessary to attain further insights into the strategies used by Mexican
interlocutors in this digital medium of communication.
Group discussion
points