Speech act theories: Compliment and Compliment responses

Learning speech acts can be one of the effective ways in developing learners’ pragmatic competence in English classroom in achieving their communicative goals in real life such as, requests, refusals, apologies, etc. Cohen&Olshtain (1993) define compliments as one of the speech acts to express solidarity between speaker and hearer and to maintain social harmony. It is obvious that a wide variety of compliments within one culture exists in terms of their roles and usage. According to Pomerantz (1978), responding to a compliment poses a dilemma for speakers because they have to balance two diametrically conflicting conversational principles: to agree with one's conversational co-participants and to avoid self-praise (Herbert, 1989). This study aims at reviewing and exploring compliments and compliment responses as speech act theories through categorizations of speech acts, definitions of compliments and compliment responses, functions of compliments, and different strategies of compliment responses studied by various researchers.