Compliment responses among Malay undergraduates / Norfakhriah Che Othman

Norfakhriah , Che Othman (2017) Compliment responses among Malay undergraduates / Norfakhriah Che Othman. Masters thesis, University of Malaya.

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Abstract

As communicative competence becomes a central pedagogical objective, more studies on speech act, which is one of the branches of pragmatics, are widely researched. One particular speech act that has been increasingly studied is compliment responses. This study aimed to investigate two major issues: the types of compliment response strategies and the factors that affect the choice these compliment response strategies demonstrated by 30 Malay undergraduates in one local university. The data which were in English language were analyzed by using two different frameworks; (1) Herbert’s framework (1998) was used to determine the types of compliment response strategies; and (2) Fukushima’s framework (1993) was used to determine factors that affect the choice of these compliment response strategies. Role plays and semi-structured interviews were employed as the main instruments for data collection method in this study. Findings showed that there were similarities and differences in the types of compliment response strategies employed by Malay male and female undergraduates. Although compliments paid to the people in the Eastern countries were normally denied (Chen, 1993), this research recorded different findings. Male participants had preferences for accepting compliments by praise upgrading themselves, while female participants had more preferences for rejecting compliments by using scaling-down strategies. Some of the compliment response strategies observed in this study were appreciation-token, comment-acceptance, and comment-history. It is also interesting to note that formality of situation, gender of complimenter and topic of compliment were the three major factors that affected the way participants responded to compliments. Therefore, it can be concluded that Malay undergraduates preferred different strategies in responding to compliments and they were mostly affected by three main factors mentioned above.

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