Abstract
Compliment is one of the most widely studied speech acts, as the extensive literature devoted to this topic shows. However, researches mainly focus on formulaic complimenting, probably because explicit compliments are far more frequent than the implicit ones. The present contribution aims to investigate implicit compliments, i.e., those where hearers «need to infer the corresponding implicature for their interpretation» (MAÍZ-ARÉVALO, 2012, p. 983; cf. also BOYLE, 2000), in a corpus of digital exchanges in Italian and German social networking sites, Instagram and WhatsApp. Firstly, the study examines and compares, from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view, the linguistic patterns used to express implicit compliments in the two languages; then, through a detailed analysis of the reactions of compliments’ addressees it explores how these speech acts are perceived by Italian and German social network users and what response types are mainly used by the complimented person in order to react to the implicit positive evaluation.
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