On Compliments and Compliment Responses in Serbian

Abstract

This paper deals with the speech act of complimenting in Serbian. A compliment is a speech act, which positively values the hearer’s characteristics, skills, physical appearance etc., and it is considered to be one of the most important discursive strategies that build and sustain solidarity among the interlocutors. This speech act has been discussed to a great extent within comparative and interlanguage research. Due to the limited number of studies dealing with compliments and compliment responses in Serbian, this paper is theoretically based on existing research on English and other languages. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) is used to elicit data of giving and receiving compliments from 65 students from the University of East Sarajevo. The DCT consists of eight everyday situations (equal number of situations for both compliments and compliment responses) and the participants are encouraged to write what they would say in real life similar situations. Our analysis shows that speakers of Serbian tend to compliment each other in a rather explicit way, whereas the most frequently occurring strategy used by the Serbian speakers when responding to compliments is acceptance.