Compliment response strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers

Abstract

This paper reports on naturally occurring compliment response (CR) in Persian. The data includes natural compliments and compliment responses gathered from 123 Iranian students of English literature and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) from varied backgrounds. Adopting Boori’s (1994) findings as a comparative baseline, the present study aims to find macro-level compliment response strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers, to explore their compliment response combination strategies, and to examine diachronic changes regarding the norms and patterns of compliment responses in Persian. As per macro-level CR strategies, the findings reveal that Persian speakers have a strong tendency to accept compliments, followed closely by evading and rejecting them. The findings further show that shekasteh-nafsi (Sharifian 2005, 2008), and avoidance of self-praise, are not a predominant schema in the Iranian users of CR strategies. Herein we highlight the possible effects related to technological, social, and cultural changes on CR behavior of Iranian users of Persian, and the underlying cultural schemata in responding to compliments.