“You Look So Pretty” to “Buzz Off!” An Intercultural Study of Compliments and Compliment Responses

The current study aims to discover variations in complimenting and complimenting responses between Arabs (Syrians) and Non-Arabs (Pakistanis) who have different L1s and speak English as L2 during their interactions at their workplace in Syria. The data was collected using a DCT containing 04 hypothetical situations or scenarios. The situations in these DCTs are based on 04 themes: 1) appearance; 2) skill; 3) possession; and 4) character. For this purpose, the DCTs were adapted from Yuan (2002) and tailored according to the situation required in the current study. The data reveals that among Pakistani L2 speakers of English, 60% of the compliments are explicit and 37.5% are implicit. Moreover, interjections brought a slight change in the syntactic structure of compliments. Interjections co-occurred with syntactic formulas as 30% of the Syrian compliments and 24% of Pakistani compliments. The data collected regarding Syrians reveals that 82.5% of the compliments are explicit and 15% are implicit. Likewise, in compliment responses, Syrians and Pakistanis respond to compliments either using the Token of acceptance (Thanks), shifting credit, downgrading, reciprocating or using a combination of these semantic strategies. The current study will be instrumental in bringing Pakistanis’ way of complimenting, from an intercultural perspective to the fore in the world of pragmatic research.