ABSTRACT
Herbert (1988) provided such an analysis in a study comparing the compliment/compliment response interchanges from American university students to South African university students. In analyzing his data, he grouped the responses as (a) Agreeing, (b) Nonagreeing, or (c) Requesting interpretation. Overall, nearly 66 per cent of the American compliment responses were broadly classified as Agreements, 31 per cent as Nonagreements, and 3 per cent as Request Interpretations. Of those Agreements (66 per cent), 7 per cent were categorized as Comment Acceptances and 29 per cent as Appreciation Tokens.1 In contrast, 88 per cent of the South African compliment responses were categorized as Agreements and 43 per cent of those Agreements were categorized as Comment Acceptances. Holmes (1988) studied compliments and compliment responses in New Zealand, another native English speaking (NES) country. She categorized 61 per cent of the responses as acceptances, 29 per cent as deflections/evasions, and 10 per cent as rejections. Her distribution of New Zealand responses closely paralleled Herbert’s (1988) study of American responses. The studies by Herbert (1988) and Holmes (1988) were helpful in providing information on the frequency of particular NES compliment response types. They did not, however, compare NES to NNES populations (such comparisons were not the purpose of their studies) and, therefore, did not contribute to an understanding of why a population of L2 learners might respond inappropriately to compliments based on transfer from their L1.
