16.3583, Review: Discourse/Pragmatics: Golato (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3583. Sun Dec 18 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3583, Review: Discourse/Pragmatics: Golato (2005)

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1)
Date: 13-Dec-2005
From: Çiler Hatipoglu < ciler2 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Compliments and Compliment Responses 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 04:36:05
From: Çiler Hatipoglu < ciler2 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Compliments and Compliment Responses 
 

AUTHOR: Golato, Andrea
TITLE: Compliments and Compliment Responses
SUBTITLE: Grammatical Structure and Sequential Organisation
SERIES: Studies in Discourse and Grammar
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins Publishing Company
YEAR:  2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-441.html 

Çiler Hatipoglu, Department of Foreign Language Education, METU, 
Ankara, Turkey

INTRODUCTION

''Compliments and Compliment Responses: Grammatical Structure and 
Sequential Organization'' lives up to its name and provides a well-
organised, detailed and comprehensive analysis of compliments and 
compliment responses in German.  This book is not only an excellent 
example of research on talk-in-interaction but also a work that sets an 
agenda for future developments in the field.  One of the main 
contributions of this conversational analytic work is that it raises the 
standards of research in this area and introduces readers to 
innovative scientific reasoning.

The book consists of seven well-written, interesting and stimulating 
chapters and each one of them deals with compliments and/or 
compliment responses from a different perspective: Chapter 1: 
Preliminaries (pp. 1-9), Chapter 2: Methodology (pp. 11-25), Chapter 
3: Giving Compliments: The Design of First Compliment Turns (pp. 27-
84), Chapter 4: Giving Compliments: Sequential Embedding and 
Function of First Compliment Turns (pp. 85-132), Chapter 5: 
Compliments in Multi-party Interactions: Third Parties Providing 
Second Compliments (pp. 133-166), Chapter 6: Compliment 
Responses (pp. 167-199), Chapter 7: Concluding Discussions (pp. 
201-212).  Notes, references, name and subject indices are given at 
the end of the book.  This review will first, present a concise 
description of the content of each of the chapters and will then offer 
critical assessment of the book as a whole.

SYNOPSIS

In Chapter 1, Andrea Golato prepares the audience to read the book.  
She starts by briefly outlining the previous research on compliments 
and compliment responses (henceforth C&CR) and presents the 
relationship between the earlier studies and her own research.  She 
also shows, however, how different her study is from prior research on 
compliments.  The data collection procedure (i.e., recordings of 
naturally occurring conversations between family and friends), the 
methodological framework (i.e., Conversational Analysis (CA)), the 
new approach to the analysis of the relationship between 'interaction 
and grammar' creates a golden combination that allows the author to 
analyze C&CR from a newer, more detailed, more exciting perspective 
which lets her to uncover relations and results not mentioned in work 
on this topic before.  The chapter ends with an outline of the following 
sections in the book.

Chapter 2 entitled ''Methodology'' consists of two main parts.  In the 
first part, the author discusses a topic which is of vital importance for 
studies based on the analysis of data, i.e., various data collection 
procedures utilized in different studies on C&CR.  A good data 
collection method for a study is the one that is able to shed light on 
the research questions under investigation (Yuan 2001).  However, 
studies done in this area also show that linguists should choose wisely 
since as Kasper and Dahl (1991:215) put it researchers in the area of 
pragmatics are dealing with ''a double layer of variability'': the first of 
these layers being the sociolinguistic properties of the speech event, 
and the second being the variability induced by different data 
collection instruments.  Each data collection procedure has its 
strengths and weaknesses and the quality of the gathered material 
and the validity of the obtained results may be affected by the 
selected data collection procedure (Fukushima 2000; Golato 2003; 
Kasper 2000; Lorenzo-Dus 2001).  Therefore, while discussing the 
different data collection tools (i.e., discourse completion tasks and 
questionnaires, role plays, recall protocols, field observations, and 
recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction), Golato presents 
both their advantages and disadvantages.  She also warns 
researchers about the problems they may encounter in using each of 
these data gathering techniques if the aim is to study 'actual language 
use'.  

In the latter section of this chapter, the author introduces the 
informants and the characteristics of the data collected for the present 
study (i.e., 30 hours of non-elicited videotaped face-to-face 
conversations and 6 hours of audiotape telephoned conversations 
between close friends and family members) and the methodological 
framework (i.e., CA) chosen for the analysis of the gathered material.  
Golato explains that the main objective of CA methodology is to 
comprehend the sequential organisation of talk-in-interaction.  
Therefore, while analysing her data the researcher did not aim at 
making probability-based assertions and/or broad generalisations.  
The major goal in this study is to present ''an adequate level of 
description of the organisation of talk-in-interaction'' (p. 24).

In ''Giving Compliments: The Design of First Compliment Turns'' 
(Chapter 3), the author aims to uncover the attributes of the 
compliment speech act and the place of the first compliment turn in a 
particular interactional sequence.  She bases her analysis on two 
assumptions: (1) the assessable (i.e., the ability, characteristic, object 
that the compliment is about) has to be identified/referred to by the 
speaker so that the receiver of the compliment knows what the 
compliment is about and (2) the positiveness of the compliment has to 
be conveyed and this can be done semantically and/or syntactically.  
The analysis of the referring expressions in compliments reveals their 
systematic and context dependent nature.  Speakers produce 
references that are tailored to the needs of the recipient and to the 
requirements of the ongoing interaction.  In this respect, Golato's 
study yields support for the anaphora studies initiated by Fox (1996) 
and Schegloff (1996) and shows that analysis based on notions such 
as 'topic' or 'distance to the last mentioned item' fails to account for 
her talk-in-interaction data.

In the section devoted to the syntactic features of 'first compliment 
turns' the author focuses on 'verb-first constructions' and 'right 
dislocated elements'.  Golato draws attention to the fact that many of 
the first compliment turns in her corpus did not include overt 
references to the assessable (i.e., their topic slots were empty) and 
had some elements of the sentence moved from their normal position 
to a position beyond sentence bracket or sentence field.  Similarly to 
Auer (1993), she argues that spoken German allows empty topic slots 
in syntactic environments in which topics are normally obligatory due 
to pragmatic reasons.  Speakers (i.e., those who give the compliment) 
in Golato's study used 'verb first constructions' when they assumed 
that all participants in the conversation shared a common orientation 
to the assessable and that, as a result of this, the receiver of the 
compliment would be able to locate the referent without any 
ambiguity.  Those who gave compliments also tended to put the 
positive evaluation of somebody/something at the end of the first turn 
(i.e., used right-dislocated elements) since they believed that in doing 
so they would make compliments more accessible to the next speaker 
and, therefore, would better recipient's chances of understanding the 
compliment.  When discussing the semantic features of German 
compliments Golato, first, lists features such as: (1) formulaic in 
nature, (2) positive value not carried by the verb but by appreciation 
sounds (either gustatory such as mmmh or other sounds of 
appreciation such as ohh, aah), (3) usually include positive degree 
adverbs such as 'schon' and 'gut', (4) most of them lack first person 
pronouns; but then, she points to the fact that these features do not 
render them obviously different from general assessments.  According 
to Golato, what really makes a compliment a compliment is the context 
within which it is uttered.

Therefore, in the following chapter she sets out to prove this point.  
Similarly to the preceding chapter, Chapter 4 (Giving Compliments: 
Sequential Embedding and Function of First Compliment Turns) deals 
only with first compliment turns.  Differently from Chapter 3, however, 
here the author focuses not only on the syntactic and semantic 
features of compliments but on the relationship between the structural 
features of compliments and the overall organisation of the sequence 
in which compliment turns are situated.  Drawing on data coming from 
a multi-party talk, Golato shows that the syntactic and semantic 
features of compliments alone do not suffice to disambiguate the 
function of the turns in question.  She points out to the fact that turns 
with the same structural properties can function not only as 
compliments and general assessments, but also as interruptions, 
reproaches, sarcasm and teases.  What is more, she shows that 
within multiparty interactions compliments can perform a number of 
(sometimes conflicting) functions at the same time.  A compliment for 
one interlocutor can serve as a criticism/reproach of another 
interlocutor in the multiparty talk, for instance.

The dual function of this speech act is also illustrated by the fact that 
compliments, in Golato's corpus, occurred in both preferred and 
dispreferred turns.  In dispreferred sequences they mostly preceded 
or followed rejections of offers, disagreements and criticisms.  That is, 
they were used to either delay the dispreferred element or to convert 
the potentially face threatening utterance into a more positive one.  
Stated differently, compliments in dispreferred responses fulfilled/had 
the function of social solidarity builders.  In preferred environments, on 
the other hand, compliments served as expressions of appreciation 
(e.g., they are used to disagree with self-depreciations, to respond to 
announcements, to support or replace thanks), transition acts from 
one activity/topic to another, or conversation closings.  These findings 
in Golato's study support Brown and Levinson's (1987), Holmes's 
(1995), and Wolfsons's (1983) claims that compliments can both 
strengthen or soften other speech acts.  Nonetheless, differently from 
these earlier studies, Golato goes beyond the observational stage, 
and by using the sequential organisation of talk-in-interaction 
framework, she is able to explain why and how compliments can carry 
out these multiple tasks successfully.

Differently from the previous two sections, Chapter 5 (Compliments in 
Multi-party Interactions: Third Parties Providing Second Compliments), 
focuses on 'second compliments' (i.e., compliments that are given by a 
third party either before or after the compliment recipient has 
responded) in multi-party talk.  More specifically, the author tries to 
uncover when and what type of compliments third parties produce, 
and where they place these compliments in the interactional sequence.

Golato's analyses indicate that 'third party compliments' are usually 
agreements.  That is, similarly to Ruhi (2001, 2002), she concludes 
that compliments define ingroupness or alignment with the compliment 
speaker.  'Second compliments' are minimal in nature (i.e., consist of 
only one turn construction unit), hence, non-intrusive.  In other words, 
they do not disturb the flow of the conversation and do not require a 
shift in the participants' roles.  Speakers continue to speak and 
listeners to listen, while the member of the group who utters 
the 'second compliment' just shows his/her alignment with the 
complimenter.  In most of the contexts 'third party compliments' are 
expressed as gustatory mmmhs, confirmation markers (e.g., yes, mm 
hm, or a head-nod), response pursuit markers (e.g., German 'ne?', 
English 'right?') or additional assessments (i.e., adjective).

Further examinations of the data reveal that third parties are highly 
sensitive to the function performed by 'first compliments'.  Golato 
points out to the fact that in her corpus 'second compliments' never 
occurred in situations in which the 'first compliment' was a part of a 
dispreferred turn.  The author states that all second compliments 
occurred in preferred environments, but she also calls for attention to 
the fact that not all compliments given in such environments were 
accompanied by a second compliment.  She argues that in most of the 
cases where a second compliment was absent, it was not noticeably 
missing since in these contexts the non-intended participants either 
did not have access to the assessable (e.g., did not see it/him/her) 
or ''the participation context made the compliment implausible'' (e.g., 
the non-intended participant was a host) (p. 204).

The penultimate chapter in the book (Chapter 6: Compliment 
Responses) has two main goals.  First, to examine the features of 
compliment responses in German, and second, to compare and 
contrast them with Pomerantz's (1978) compliment response data 
coming from American English.  The comparison of these two corpora 
is made possible because both studies are conducted within the 
conversational analytic framework.

Golato mentions that in her analysis of American English, Pomerantz 
(1978) concludes that recipients of compliments face a dilemma 
between agreeing with compliments as the preferred next turn for 
positive assessments and avoiding engagement in self-praising 
behaviour.  In attempt to solve this predicament, compliment recipients 
respond to positive assessments (i.e., compliments) with expressions 
that partly agree and partly disagree wit the complimenter's statement 
(e.g., 'A: Gee, Hon, you look nice in that dress.', 'B: Do you really think 
so? It's just a rag that my sister gave me', p. 170).  According to 
Herbert (1986, 1989), Herbert and Straight (1989), and Pomerantz 
(1978), there are a number of formulae Americans use to achieve 
this 'in between' effect: (1) shifting the evaluation, (2) shifting the 
evaluation in form of a qualification, (3) deflecting the compliment to 
an object or to a third party, (4) giving a non-evaluative comment, (5) 
reinterpreting the compliment.

When discussing the compliment responses in German, Golato points 
out to the fact that differently from the example compliment responses 
in etiquette books and against native speakers' intuitions, German 
native speakers 'overwhelmingly' accepted compliments.  Again, 
contrary to all recommendations in etiquette books, none of the 
informants in her study accepted the compliment by using an 
appreciation marker/token such as 'Danke' (Thank you).  What is 
more, none of the German compliment response types were parallel to 
ones found in American English.  The two most common German ways 
of expressing an appreciation of a compliment, encountered in the 
current corpus, were to provide an assessment of the compliment or 
to agree with the compliment assertion by confirming the assertion 
(i.e., by saying 'ja').  What the author concludes at the end of this 
chapter is that even though both Americans and Germans have a 
number of ways of accepting compliments, 'the design of these 
acceptance turns differ drastically across the two speech communities' 
(p. 207), a fact which might cause conversation breakdowns (i.e., 
misunderstandings and misinterpretations) when interlocutors from 
those two cultures interact with each other.

In the last chapter of the book (Chapter 7: Concluding Discussions), 
before discussing the limitations of the current study and presenting 
some suggestions for further research, Golato summarizes the 
findings of the study and presents the broader implications of her 
results in terms of sequence organisation and grammar and 
interaction research.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

''Compliments and Compliment Responses: Grammatical Structure and 
Sequential Organization'' is a thought-provoking research which looks 
at compliments and compliment responses (C&CR) from a newer, 
more dynamic, more sophisticated perspective.  Therefore, this work 
will undoubtedly stimulate future research in this area.  By combining 
finely the data collection procedure, the methodological framework 
and the approach to the examination of data, Golato is able to not 
only illustrate but also to explain the multifaceted, often covert nature 
of the relationship between the structure, place in the sequence and 
function of C&CR in German.  The issues raised and discussed in the 
book are important for the study of talk-in-interaction and for the study 
of interactional linguistics as well as for the fields of cross-cultural 
communication, speech acts and foreign/second language education.  

The language and the style of the author and the interesting and 
insightful examples make the book a very enjoyable read.  The 
connectedness between the chapters and the well-rounded analysis 
of the material make the volume an excellent resource for all those 
interested in discourse and pragmatics.  Hence, I recommend it in the 
highest possible terms.

REFERENCES

Auer, Peter.  (1993).  Zur Verbspitzenstellung im gesprochen Deutsch 
[The verb in first position in spoken German].  Deutsche Sprache, 3, 
193-222.

Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen C.  (1987).  Politeness: Some 
Universals in Language Usage.  Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press.

Fox, Barbara A. (Ed.)  (1996).  Studies in Anaphora.  
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Fukushima, Saeko.  (2000).  Requests and Culture: Politeness in 
British English and Japanese.  Bern: Peter Lang. 

Golato, Andrea.  (2003).  Studying compliment responses: A 
comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occurring talk.  
Applied Linguistics, 24 (1), 90-121.

Herbert, Robert K. (1986).  Say ''Thank you'' -- or something.  
American Speech, 61 (1), 76-88.

Herbert, Robert K. (1989).  The ethnography of English compliments 
and compliment responses: A contrastive sketch.  In Wieslaw Oleksy 
(Ed.), Contrastive Pragmatics (pp. 3-35).  Amsterdam/Philadelphia: 
John Benjamins.

Herbert, Robert K. & Straight, H. Stephen.  (1989).  Compliment-
rejection versus compliment-avoidance: Listener-based versus 
speaker-based pragmatic strategies.  Language and Communication, 
9 (1), 35-47.

Holmes, Janet.  (1995).  Women, Men and Politeness.  London & New 
York: Longman.

Kasper, Gabriele.  (2000).  Data collection in pragmatic research.  In 
Helen Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport 
through Talk across Cultures (pp. 316-341).  London & New York: 
Continuum.

Kasper, Gabriele & Dahl, Merete.  (1991).  Research methods in 
interlanguage pragmatics.  Studies in Second Language Acquisition 
(SSLA), 13, 215-247.

Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria.  (2001).  Compliment responses among British 
and Spanish university students: A contrastive study.  Journal of 
Pragmatics, 33 (1), 107-127.

Pomerantz, Anita.  (1978).  Compliment responses.  Notes on the 
cooperation of multiple constraints.  In Jim Schenkein (Ed.), Studies in 
the Organisation of Conversational Interaction (pp. 79-112).  New 
York, San Francisco, London: Academic Press.

Ruhi, Sükriye.  (2001).  Complimenting women in Turkish: Shaping 
identity and defining ingroupness.  In Eniko Nemeth (Ed.), Pragmatics 
in 2000: Selected Papers from the 7th International Pragmatics 
Conference (Volume 2) (pp. 481-495).  Antwerp: International 
Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

Ruhi, Sükriye.  (2002).  Complimenting women in Turkish: Gender 
identity and otherness.  In Ann Duszak (Ed.), Us and Others: Social 
Identities across Languages, Discourse and Cultures (pp. 401-427).  
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Schegloff, Emanuel A.  (1996).  Some practices for referring to 
persons in talk-in-interaction: A partial sketch of a systematics.  In Fox, 
Barbara A. (Ed.), Studies in Anaphora (pp. 437-485).  
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Wolfson, Nessa.  (1983).  An empirically based analysis of 
complementing in American English.  In Nessa Wolfson and Elliot Judd 
(Eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition (pp. 82-95).  New 
York: Newbury House Publishers.

Yuan, Yi.  (2001).  An inquiry into empirical pragmatics data-gathering 
methods: Written DCTs, oral DCTs, field notes, and natural 
conversations.  Journal of Pragmatics, 33 (2), 271-292. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr Çiler Hatipoglu is a lecturer at Middle East Technical University, 
Ankara, Turkey, where she teaches various linguistics and ELT 
courses.  Her main areas of interest are speech acts, language and 
gender, politeness, cross-cultural communication and interlanguage 
pragmatics.





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