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3 - Online Compliments of Iranian Facebook Users

from Part I - Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Speech Acts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2019

By
Zohreh R. Eslami ,
Nasser Jabbari  and
Li-Jen Kuo
Edited by
Eva Ogiermann  and
Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
Eva Ogiermann
Affiliation:
King's College London
Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Charlotte
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Summary

Eslami, Jabbari, and Kuo examine over 4,000 compliments produced by Persian Facebook users, focusing on comments on profile pictures and providing a systematic overview of online complimenting behavior in a language that remains strongly underrepresented within politeness research. The authors examine verbal and non-verbal compliment forms, the latter overwhelmingly represented by ‘likes’, a convenient way of paying compliments, though the exact target of the ‘like’ remains ambiguous. The verbal compliments involve different forms of modification and take explicit (often elliptical) and implicit forms. The interpretation of implicit forms requires the complimentee and the analyst to infer implied meaning based on common background knowledge reflecting in-group norms and values, though the presence of the picture and the responses to the compliment facilitate the analyst’s interpretation. The study compares the data to previous (unpublished) work on face-to-face compliments in Persian, and concludes that implicit compliments are more common in the examined online environment, with modification playing a central role in achieving the desired effect of the comment.

Keywords

Face
Type
Chapter
Information
From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness
Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives
 , pp. 68 - 92
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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