Compliments and approaches to compliment responses

Abstract Complimenting is a complex sociolinguistic speech act that has been characterized as an adjacency pair or a two-unit turn. The same compliment can be interpreted very differently in various contexts, and so responding to a compliment would depend very much on what kind of communicative act the compliment is perceived to be. In the present paper, we will review compliment category frameworks widely used in previous studies and discuss previous approaches to the study of compliment responses ( CR s). A review of previous data collection methods reveals certain limitations of those instruments. Compliments and CR s are contextually bound, so previous CR studies based on those approaches may be valuable for the investigation of CR strategies as well as their syntactic forms and semantic features. However, those studies seemed not to capture all the functions and meanings of compliments along with particular features of contexts that may influence compliment behaviours. Future research may aim to explore these issues further.