A Pragmatic Study of Compliment Responses in Northern Kurmanji

Abstract

Compliments and compliment responses are considered as one of the most common linguistic phenomena in all languages. People use compliments and compliments responses in everyday interaction in order to make a conversation go on. However, the strategies of complimenting and responding to them may differ from one culture to another. Such strategies are realized in terms of order, frequency, formulas and responses. The study aims at investigating compliment responses in Northern Kurmanji with reference to English. It tries to find out the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of responding to compliments syntactically, semantically and socially. The study is based on some hypotheses, the validity of which required designing a questionnaire to find out the responses used by speakers of Northern Kurmanji in different social contexts. The questionnaire consists of written discourse completion task (DCT) with four situational settings (appearance, ability, possession and character). About 80 Kurdish college students in the Department of English/ College of Humanities/ University of Duhok during the academic year 2014-2015 participated in this study. Finally, the data are analyzed using Holmes' three categories of compliment responses (accept, reject and deflect/ evade). The analysis of the data has revealed that the native speakers of Northern Kurmanji use different strategies in responding to compliments. Moreover, native speakers of Northern Kurmanji seem to be polite in their responses to compliments.