Compliment Responses by College Male and Female Filipino Second Language Learners of English

Abstract

This study analyzed compliment responses (CRs) of Filipino male and female ESL students through a discourse completion task (DCT) adapted from Tang and Zhang (J Pragmat 41:325–345, 2009) on four situational topics of appearance, character, ability, and possession (Manes and Wolfson in The compliment formula: conversational routine, Mount Publishers, Amsterdam, 1981; Wolfson in: Wolfson, Judd (eds) Sociolinguistics and language acquisition, Newbury House, Rowley, MA, pp 82–95, 1983; Holmes in Anthropol Linguist 8:485–508, 1986). The 807 CRs elicited were categorized into Holmes’ (J Pragmat 12(3):445–465, 1988; J Pragmat 20(2):91–116, 1993) three-way macro-level CRs of accept, reject, and evade and their micro-level CRs. Focus group discussions (FGDs) were also conducted to supplement and corroborate data from the DCT. Results showed an overwhelming number of CRs of accepting compliments (Cs) of both male and female contrary to findings in studies of other Asian speakers in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Vietnam who generally rejected and downgraded Cs (Chen in J Pragmat 20(1):49–75, 1993; Baba in A study of interlanguage pragmatics: compliment responses by learners of Japanese and English as a second language, 1996; Tran in The nature and conditions of pragmatic discourse investigated through naturalized role-play, Lincom Europa, Muenchen, 2006; Yu in Mod Lang J 88(1):102–119, 2004), and also similar to English native speakers who generally accepted Cs (Chen 1993; Herbert in Am Speech 61(1):76–88, 1986). A preponderance of data, however, showed a peculiar Filipino way of accepting then underplaying the effect of accepting Cs through combination and modification strategies that avoid self-praise. Ability to do this is only possible with relatively adequate linguistic repertoire that make ESL learners pragmatically and communicatively competent. It is hypothesized that this language tendency also has an L1 culture connection.