Sulle strategie di risposta ai complimenti in un campione diatopicamente orientato


Abstract


This research aims at exploring the pragmatic strategies of responding to compliments in a speech sample of 654 compliment/response sequences elicited by means of DCT. The corpus has a specific diatopic connotation, since all respondents come from Apulia. For the analysis, the pragmatic categorization proposed for Italian language by Castagneto and Ravetto in 2015 has been adopted. Within the sample, both mitigation and reinforcement strategies coexist, although they are not equally distributed among the informants. The results reveal the presence of cross-gender and cross-ages differences. In details, males tend to use more Limited Acceptance than female ones, while younger women show a strong preference for Direct Acceptance, especially by Thanking and Reassurance Request. Differently, older female informants present a greater degree of Limited Acceptance and a wider use of avoidance strategies, such as Deflection or Discredit.

 


DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v56p361

Keywords: compliment responses; pragmatic functions; speech act

References


Alfonzetti G. 2008, Rispondere ai complimenti, in Studi in onore di Nicolò Mineo, vol. I, Catania, Gruppo Editoriale s.r.l Acireale, pp. 99-137.

Alfonzetti G. 2009, I complimenti nella conversazione, Editori Riuniti University Press, Roma.

Alfonzetti G. 2013, Compliments, in Sbisà M., Turner K. (eds.), Pragmatics of Speech Actions, (Handbooks of Pragmatics, vol. 2), Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 531-562.

Alfonzetti G. 2015, Variazioni interculturali nei complimenti: la modulazione dell’intensità, in “Le Forme e la Storia” 8([1], pp. 37-53.

Austin J.L. 1965, How to do things with words, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Brown P. and Levinson S.C. 1987, Politeness. Some universals in language usage, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Castagneto M. 2016, Le risposte ai complimenti in Italia: questioni di gender, “Atti del Sodalizio Glottologico Milanese” voll. VIII-IX n.s. (2013-2014), Edizioni dell’Orso, Alessandria, pp. 169-179.

Castagneto M. 2019, Dagli estranei non si accettano caramelle, ma si accettano complimenti, in Nuzzo E., Vedder I. (eds.), Lingua in contesto: la prospettiva pragmatica, Collana “Studi AItLA” 8, Officinaventuno, Milano, pp. 129-147.

Castagneto M., Ravetto M. 2015, The variability of compliment responses: Italian and German data, in Gesuato S. et al. (ed.), Teaching, learning and investigating pragmatics: Principles, methods and practices, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 387-413.

Castagneto M., Sidraschi D. 2017, La formula del complimento in italiano, in De Meo A., Dovetto, F.M., La Comunicazione Parlata, Aracne, Roma, pp. 193-211.

Castagneto M., Sidraschi D. 2018, Strategie di risposta ai complimenti sull’aspetto fisico in italiano, in Gille J., Norén C. (eds.), Self and other in dialogue. Romance studies on discourse and interaction, Peter Lang, Berlin, pp. 59-90.

Chen R. 1993, Responding to compliments. A contrastive study of politeness strategies between American English and Chinese speakers, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 20, pp. 49-75.

Chen R., Yang D. 2010, Responding to compliments in Chinese: has it changed?, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 42[7], pp.1951-1963.

Daikuhara M. 1986, A study of compliments from a cross-cultural perspective: Japanese and English, in “Working Papers in Educational Linguistics” 2[2], pp. 103-135.

Frescura M. 1996, The conflictual behavior of Italian speakers in responding to compliments, in “Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata” 28, pp. 89-110.

Golato A. 2002, German compliment responses, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 34, pp. 547-571.

Herbert R.K. 1989, The ethnography of English compliments and compliment responses: A contrastive sketch, in Oleksy W. (ed.), Contrastive Pragmatics, Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 3-35.

Holmes J. 1986, Compliment and compliment responses in New Zealand English, in “Anthropological Linguistics ” 28[4], pp. 485-508.

Kerbrat-Orecchioni C. 1987, La description des echanges en analyse conversationnelle: l’exemple du compliment, in “DRLAV - Revue de Linguistique” 36/37, pp. 1-53.

Leech G.N. 1983, Principles of pragmatics, Longman, London.

Lorenzo-Dus N. 2001, Compliment responses among British and Spanish university students: A contrastive study, “Journal of Pragmatics” 33[1], pp. 107-127.

Manes J. 1983, Compliments: a mirror of cultural values, in Wolfson N., Judd E. (eds.), Sociolinguistics and language acquisition, Newbury House Rowley, MA, pp. 96-102.

Manes J., Wolfson N. 1981, The Compliment formula, in Coulmas F. (ed.), Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech, Mouton Publishers, The Hague, pp. 116-132.

Matsuura H. 2004, Compliment-giving behavior in American English and Japanese, in “Jalt Journal” 26[2], pp. 147-170.

Norrick N.R. 1978, Expressive illocutionary acts, in “Journal of Pragmatics” 2‚ pp. 277-291.

Parisi C. and Wogan P. 2006, Compliment topics and gender, in “Women and Language” 29, pp. 21-28.

Pomerantz A. 1978, Compliment responses: Notes on the cooperation of multiple constraints, in Schenkein J. (ed.), Studies in the organization of conversational interaction, Academic Press, New York, pp. 79-112.

Ravetto M., Castagneto M. 2020, Co.Cor (Compliment Corpus). Un corpus multilingue di complimenti, in De Meo A., Dovetto F. M. (eds.), La comunicazione parlata 2018, Aracne, Canterano (RM), pp. 243-262.

Sifianou M. 2001, ‘Oh! How appropriate!’ Compliments and politeness, in Bayraktaroğlu A., Sifianou M. (eds.), Linguistic politeness across boundaries: the case of Greek and Turkish, Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 391-430.

Sidraschi D. 2014, Pragmatics and ethnolinguistics of compliment: compliment responses in Novara and Grottaglie, in “Lingue e Linguaggi” 11, pp. 225-239.


Full Text: PDF

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.
کاغذ a4

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.