Some major ways to give and interpret english compliments

THANH HOA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
NGUYEN MONG TUAN COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL

EXPERIENCED INITIATIVE

SOME MAJOR WAYS TO GIVE AND INTERPRET
ENGLISH COMPLIMENTS

Writer: Le Thi Ngoc Anh
School's post: Teacher
School: Nguyen Mong Tuan comprehensive school
Experienced initiative: English

THANH HOA 2016


TABLE OF CONTENT
1: INTRODUCTION
1.1. Rationale
1.2. Aims of the study
1.3. Scope of the study
1.4. Significance of the study
1.5. Method of the study

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2: DEVELOPMENT
2.1: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1.1. Definition of compliments
2.1.2. Types of compliments
2.1.3. Some syntactic and semantic features
of formulae compliments
2.1.4. Implicit compliments and indirectness
2.1.5. Critical Approaches to Translation

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2. 2: INTERPRETING FORMULAIC COMPLIMENTS
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2.2.1. Discrepancies in the translation of compliments:
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different syntactic structures and lexis, different pragmatic effects
2.2.2. Omissions and reductions in translation
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2.3: INTERPRETING IMPLICIT COMPLIMENTS
2.3.1. Compliments not concerning the addressee directly
2.3.2. Compliments involving a comparison
3 : CONCLUSION
3.1. Recapitulation
3.2. Concluding remarks

3.3. Limitations of the study
3.4. Suggestions for further studies
4: REFERENCES

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1: INTRODUCTION
1. 1.Rationale
Compliments are speech acts that are primarily aimed at
maintaining, improving, or supporting the addressee’s face (Goffman
1967). They can in fact be used for a variety of reasons: to express
admiration or approval of someone’s work/ appearance/ taste; to establish/
confirm/ maintain solidarity; to replace greetings/ gratitude/ apologies/
congratulations; to soften face-threatening acts such as apologies,
requests and criticism; to open and sustain conversation; to reinforce
desired behavior.
As Winston Brembeck points out, “to know another’s language and
not his culture is a very good way to make a fluent fool of one’s self” (as
cited in Nguyen, 1996, p.38). This comment has highlighted the importance
of the understanding of a culture beside a good command of its language.
In that sense, students of English should be aware of Anglicist cultures
apart from the learning of their language. Compliment-giving and
responding behavior is used to negotiate social identities and relations. As

a consequence, inappropriate choice of responses can lead to a loss of face.
The preferred sequel to compliments is acceptance, but in American
English, for instance, two thirds of the time respondents to compliments do
something other than overtly and fully accept them (e.g. mitigate, deflect
or reject, request interpretation; Herbert 1990).
The study aims to investigate the interpretation of some aspects
relating to the texture of linguistic politeness in compliments. Starting from
the premise that critical approaches “would not be concerned so much with
issues such as mistranslation in itself but rather the politics of translation,
the way in which translating and interpreting are related to concerns such
as class, gender, difference, ideology and social context”. (Vo, 2007).
All the aforementioned reasons have encouraged the researcher to
work on this issue in hope of gaining insights into the compliment issue.

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1.2. Aims of the study
Firstly, the researcher would like to explore the ways to give compliments
of British and Americans.
Secondly, the success of these compliments with the addressees would be
measured.
Finally, interpreting of these compliments is compared to the original ones.
This paper concentrates on compliments in some British and American
conservation in order to answer two essential research questions:
1) What are the popular ways to give compliments in Britain and America?
2) To what extent are these speech acts successful with the addressees (i.e.
speech acts that achieve the aim of creating good rapport and solidarity, or
even, in some cases, some other more covert illocutionary aims)?
3) How are these speech acts translated in interlingua conversations?

1.3. Scope of the study
* Field of study
The main focus of this study is on “critical approaches to interpreting
compliments”. This means that the study covered only compliment, not
other dimensions of linguistics or culture.
* Number of targeted languages
To draw an interpretation of compliments, research would be central to
these two target languages: English and Vietnamese.
1.4. Significance of the study
Once having been finished, this research would bring about decent
benefits. First, the research can shed the light on some major ways to give
and interpret English compliments. Thus, it provides an insight into
Vietnamese and English-speaking cultures, contributing to the mutual
understanding between those countries. Moreover, the research would
serve as a precious reference for any subject related to Vietnamese and
American culture in general and Vietnamese and American punctuality in
particular.
1.5. Method of the study
*Approach
The research was conducted as an application of contrastive approach. The
contrastive approach, as defined by Wikipedia “the systematic study of a
pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and
similarities. Historically it has been used to establish language
genealogies.” Contrastive Analysis was used extensively in the field of

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Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a
method of explaining why some features of a Target Language were more

difficult to acquire than others. According to the behaviorist theories
prevailing at the time, language learning was a question of habit formation,
and this could be reinforced or impeded by existing habits. Therefore, the
difficulty in mastering certain structures in a second language (L2)
depended on the difference between the learners' mother language (L1) and
the language they were trying to learn
*Data collection instruments
This study employed conversation studying and interpreting as the main
sources for data collection.
*Data collection procedure
To collect the necessary data, the researchers followed the procedure
below.
Step 1: Search the conversations
The conversations, after being found, were piloted by two American
participants. The American student were working in AIESEC Hanoi.
AIESEC, the world's largest student organization, is the international
platform where researcher spent time doing voluntary work.
Step 2: Revise the conversations
After the piloting conversations, an amendment was made to enhance the
accuracy of compliments in terms of linguistics.
Step 3: Interpret the conversations
Finally, the researcher search for the interpretation of the compliments in
Vietnamese through experiences in teaching at Nguyen Mong Tuan high
school.
*Data analysis
The collected data was processed with the application of interpretive
methods, which was used to discuss the results.
Procedures:
The researcher followed the following procedures to collect and analyze
data.

Step 1: search the conversations
Step 2: revise the conversations
Step 3: interpret the conversations
Step 4: code the conversations
Step 5: analyze the conversations

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2: DEVELOPMENT
2. 1: Literature Review
2.1.1. Definition of compliments
Compliments are a simple, yet powerful, relationship building tool.
There are many different reasons to give a compliment. It is an
expression of praise, congratulation or encouragement. Compliments
are primarily aimed at maintaining, enhancing, or supporting the
addressee’s face (Goffman, 1967) and are used for a variety of
reasons, the most significant of which is perhaps to express admiration or
approval of someone’s work/appearance/taste. On the basis of several
socio-pragmatic studies (Wolfson, 1981, 1984; Manes & Wolfson, 1980;
Wolfson & Manes, 1980; Herbert, 1991; Holmes 1988), it is evident that
compliments are routine formulae and tend to use a few syntactic patterns
and a limited vocabulary that are instrumental in the expression of
admiration and praise.
Compliment-giving and responding behavior is used to
negotiate social identities and relations.
As a consequence,
inappropriate choice of responses can lead to a loss of face.
Furthermore, it might also be argued that compliments, although primarily
polite speech acts or “face flattering acts” (Manno, 2005), can make

complimented feel uneasy or embarrassed, thereby creating a threat for
their negative face.
On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies it is evident that
speech acts are subject to cultural and socio-linguistic variations
(Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Apart from macroscopic cultural and
linguistic differences in the giving and accepting of compliments, some
interesting changes can also be observed depending on socio-linguistic
variables (age, gender, status, etc.).
2.1.2. Types of compliments
On the basis of several socio-pragmatic studies (Wolfson, 1981, 1984;
Manes & Wolfson, 1980; Wolfson & Manes, 1980; Herbert, 1991;

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Holmes 1988), it is evident that compliments are routine formulae and
tend to use a few syntactic patterns and a limited vocabulary that are
instrumental in the expression of admiration and praise. Therefore, it
can be said that formulae compliments, which share some common patterns
when being analyzed, is the first type of compliments.
The second type of compliments, as Holmes correctly remarks (1988:
446-447), compliments most typically attribute a positive quality to
the addressee, even when the compliment seems to refer to a third party.
This kind of utterance is easily interpreted as a compliment because it
praises the recipient in an indirect way as illustrated below:
Mary comments on Tom – Laura’s son: What a healthy boy!
Laura: Thanks. We try our best.
These ones are categorized as implicit compliments.
2.1.3. Some syntactic and semantic features of formulae compliments
Research on compliments, no matter in which language, has

incontrovertibly shown that they are quite formulaic in nature. The most
interesting results for American English are those that emerge from the
studies by Manes and Wolf- son (Manes and Wolfson 1980; Wolfson and
Manes 1980). With reference to the research, most patterns of the
compliments are the following:
1. NP is/looks (really) ADJ
Your sweater is really nice.
2. I (really) like/love + Noun phrase
I like your car.
3. PRO + is (really) + (a) ADJ + Noun phrase
That’s a good question.
4. You V (a) (really) ADJ + Noun phrase
You did a great job.
5. You V + Noun phr. + (really) ADV
You sang it very well.
6. You have (a) (really) ADJ + Noun phrase You have a beautiful cat.
7. What (a) + ADJ + Noun phrase!
What a pretty shirt!
8. ADJ + Noun phrase!
Good shot!
9. Isn’t + Noun phrase + ADJ!
Isn’t that ring pretty!
Formulaicity is also to be observed in the limited choice of vocabulary.
Manes and Wolfson observed that low specificity adjectives such as “nice”
and “good”, among semantically positive adjectives, cover together 42% of
adjectival occurrences in compliments. If “beautiful”, “pretty” and “great”
are added to the group, the percentage increases to reach two thirds of all
adjectival compliments. Among verbs, “like” and “love” are the most
frequent and occur in 90% of verbal compliments.

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2.1.4. Implicit compliments and indirectness
As pointed out
above, the majority of scholars agree that
compliments are formulaic in nature, with frequently repeated syntactic
patterns and lexical material. Yet, as Boyle advocates (2000), compliments
are not necessarily formulaic and in certain genres there is a marked
preference for implicit forms (cf. also Herbert, 1991:383). By implicit
compliments Boyle means two different speech acts: one that refers to the
addressee’s achievement, whose recognition strongly depends on indexical
knowledge; and one that compares the addressee to someone he/she thinks
highly of. The expression of praise rests on a comparison, whose
interpretation depends on the addressee’s knowledge of the object of the
comparison.
Indirectness in performing speech acts is one of the objects of
Thomas’s study (1995: 120) that claimed that it was both costly and risky.
It is costly because an indirect utterance takes longer for the speaker to
formulate and for the hearer to process; it is risky because it is not always
successful. Indirect compliments include the desire to make one’s speech
more interesting (in some cases also less interesting by deflecting attention
from one’s speech), to strengthen the illocutionary force of one’s message
and to achieve competing perlocutionary goals.
2.1.5. Critical Approaches to Translation
With reference to the article “Critical Applied Linguistics: Concerns
and Domains” by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vo Dai Quang (2007), critical
approaches to translation are included in other domains of textual analysis
to critical applied linguistics. “Such an approach would not be concerned
so much with issues such as mistranslation in itself but rather the politics of

translation, the way in which translating and interpreting are related to
concerns such as class, gender, difference, ideology and social context”.
(Vo, 2007). He also pointed out that critical applied linguistics “is based on
an ethics of difference and tries in its practice to move toward change” and
that “the need to unsettle local cultural hegemonies through the challenges
of translation all point to the need for an approach to translation based on
an ethics of difference” (Vo, 2007).

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2. 2: Interpreting Formulaic Compliments
2.2.1. Discrepancies in the translation of compliments: different
syntactic structures and lexis, different pragmatic effects
The translation of compliments sometimes shows discrepancies
across the two languages involved. This may be due to systemic
differences between the languages at stake, to cultural preferences and to
idiosyncratic choices. In many examples, the trend seems to be towards
the expression of compliment on performance in the English original and
on personal traits in the Vietnamese translation. In this concern, it is
perhaps fruitful to recall the results Creese (1991: 53), authors agree that
the largest topic category in American English is appearance, for British
English it seems to be ability. As will be shown, however, it appears that
in Vietnamese compliments on appearance or on qualities are preferred to
those on performance.
Some examples would shed some light in this issue.
Situation 1: Mary and Peter are watching the scene that has just been
performed by Julie, an actress starring as a nurse in the new film.
English
Vietnamese

Mary: That’s great.
Mary: Bạn diễn rất hay.
Peter: Yeap, you were
Peter: Ừm, bạn diễn rất tuyệt.
wonderful.
Julie: Cám ơn. Mình đã cố gắng
Julie: Thanks. I tried my best
rất nhiều.
In the example, both “You were wonderful” and “That’s great” are
compliments that refer to a scene that has just been performed by Julie.
Reference is therefore quite easily established. The use of a pronoun is
possible because reference is being made to an action or an event that is
currently relevant and therefore easily accessible. Participants shared the
same context of situation to make sense of what their partners say. The
translation of the first compliment in Vietnamese also shifts the focus
from the performance, the shooting of the scene, and insists instead on
one of the character’s personal qualities. In the Vietnamese version the
compliments uttered by Mary and Peter have therefore the same syntactic
pattern, whereas they differ in the original. Moreover, the verbs “be” in

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the original version were translate into “diễn”, an action verb in
Vietnamese version.
Situation 2: Peter and Mary give compliment on Hal’s successful
presentation of his new proposal to implement business in the
company where he works. Hal is praised for his well-argumented talk
and the brilliant ideas that he has put forward.
English

Vietnamese
Mary: Well done, Hal.
Mary: Cậu cừ lắm , Hal.
Peter: Nice job!
Peter: Bài thuyết trình rất hay!
Hall: Thanks.
Hall: Cám ơn mọi người
In the translation, instead, little importance is attached to his
performance, for the first compliment (“cậu cừ lắm”) is very generic.
Also it is quite vague as it refers to people and not to the performance as
it does in the original version. In the original, the first compliment
concerns a successful performance, whereas it is turned into a recognition
of some stable personal qualities in the translation.
However, the second compliment reflects rather exactly what bears in the
original because both of which refer to the presentation rather than the
person. Vietnamese version, yet, prolongs and differs from the original. It
uses the full structure (N+be+adj) instead of the noun phrase as in the
English version.
Situation 3: Joe was on TV as singer. Joe and Mary are talking
about Joe’s performance.
English
Vietnamese
Joe: You saw me on TV?
Joe: Thấy tớ trên TV không ?
Mary: Listen, I wish you to
Mary: Nghe này, mình muốn
know you’re doing a
bạn biết bạn hát rất hay.
fantastic job.
In the above example as well, in the original the compliment concerns a

successful performance, whereas it is turned into a recognition of some
stable personal qualities in the subtitles.

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2.2.2. Omissions and reductions in translation
Reductions seem to be more likely than complete omissions in
translating compliment, which would drastically subvert the pragmatic
texture of an interaction (Hatim and Mason 2000: 438).
Situation 1:
English
Vietnamese
Mary: Tucker, what
Mary: Tucker, có chuyện gì
happened to your company?
xảy ra với công ty của cậu
Tucker: uh, well, uh yeah.
vậy?
That’s a very good query,
Tucker: À, uh thì…. Đấy là
Mary. Well done.
một câu hỏi hay đấy Mary ạ.
The original contains two compliments which are syntactically
different but both of them concern Mary’s behavior, therefore a
performance. They are condensed in the translation, where emphasis is
placed on Mary’s question.
Situation 2:
English
Vietnamese

Mary: Now tell me what you
Mary: Bạn thấy bức tranh này
think of this painting. You
thế nào? Bạn thích nó chứ?
like it?
Peter: Rất hấp dẫn.
Peter: Wow. It’s very...
intriguing, isn’t it?
The interjection “Wow” is omitted and the adjective “intriguing” is
badly translated into Vietnamese. The English adjective shows approval, even
though something intriguing may not be fully understood or penetrated (e.g.
an intriguing remark). Besides, the English structure (N +be+ A) was
simplified by a noun phrase.

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2. 3: Interpreting Implicit Compliments
Among non-conventional compliments, one should distinguish
between two main sub-classes, those that use indirect phrasings to
compliment the interlocutor, which can be considered cases of pragmatic
ellipsis and are felicitous only if the interlocutor draws a series of bridging
inferences, and those that similarly employ non-routine language and would
seem to praise the addressee but turn out to have a different covert
illocutionary force when projected on a macro level.
2.3.1. Compliments not concerning the addressee directly
These compliments in examples are centered on some outstanding deed
performed by the addressee or, more loosely, on his/her qualities. In these
cases, the compliments are implicitly conveyed for the positive remarks that
do not concern the addressee directly but somehow reflect on him/her.

Situation 1: Mary’s mother and stepfather are talking when Mary comes. The
compliment is her stepfather speaking to Ted, the boy who is going to take
her out.
English

Vietnames

Mary’s mother: Oh, here she comes. Mẹ Mary: Ôi, con bé đây rồi. Con yêu,
Oh, honey, you look beautiful.
trông con đẹp lắm
Mary’s stepfather: Oh shit look at that! Dượng Mary: Khỉ thật, nhìn kìa! Cậu
You better be careful, boy!
nên coi chừng đấy!

This is the indirect compliment, which alludes to Mary’s beauty despite not
mentioning anything about her. The implicit compliment is exploited to warn
Ted, the boy who is going to take her out, against taking advantage of her.

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Situation 2: Mr. Hal first met Rosemary’s mother, Mrs. Sarah.
English

Vietnamese

Mrs. Sarah: Nice to meet you, Hal.
Mrs. Sarah: Rất vui được gặp ông,
Hal: The pleasure is mine, Mrs. ông Hal.
Shanahan. Wow. I can see whereMr. Hal: Thật vinh dự cho tôi, bà

Rosemary gets her beauty.
Sarah. Giờ thì tôi đã biết vì sao
Rosemary xinh đến vậy.

The praise of Rosemary’s beauty seems to be an indirect compliment paid to
her mother although there is nothing about Mrs. Sarah is mentioned.
Situation 3: Mary and Magma are talking about Mary’s boyfriend.
English

Vietnamese

Magma: Này, ai là chàng trai may
Magma: So, who’s the lucky guy?
Mary: His name’s Pat. I met him at a mắn đó thế ?
Mary: Tên anh ấy là Pat. Mình gặp
party last month.
anh ấy ở 1 bữa tiệc tháng trước.

In this situation, Mary is indirectly complimented with the expression ‘the
lucky guy’, which refers to the man she goes out with. The expression ‘the
lucky guy’ presupposes that she has a whole range of positive qualities and
that the guy who she is seeing is very lucky to have such a girl.
2.3.2. Compliments involving a comparison
The type of implicit compliments involving a comparison between the
addressee and someone he/she thinks highly of are also quite abundant, but
the comparison may be either extended to someone the speaker values highly
or may take the form of a relation of some different kind, for example that of
group inclusion. So the complimentee is shown praise because he/she is a
member of a set. This is the case of both examples below.
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Situation 1: Bill is a doctor, and Gayle and Bill are talking about his job.
English

Vietnamese

Gayle: Do you know what’s so niceGayle: Bạn biết làm bác sĩ có gì rất
about doctors?
hay không?
Bill: What?
Bill: Là cái gì vậy?
Gayle: They always seem so Gayle: Họ thường thì rất hiểu biết.
knowledgeable. I bet you work too Mình cá là cậu học rất chăm chỉ.
hard, man.

The example shows how the complimentee is praised for being part of a
group of people that are the object of esteem, i.e. doctors. The fact that Bill,
the addressee of the compliment, is himself a doctor is explicitly mentioned
only when Gayle switches from the general pronoun ‘they’ to the inclusive
‘you’ in ‘I bet you work too hard’.
Situation 2: John and Peter are talking about Messy, an Argentina football
player.
English
Vietnamese
John: Did you watch the match last Gayle: Cậu xem trận hôm qua không?
night?
Bill: Tất nhiên, Messy chơi hay thật.
Bill: Of course, Messy was great.
Gayle: Anh ấy đúng là Maradonna.

Gayle: He is another Maradonna. I betMình cá là đội của anh ấy sẽ vô địch.
his team will be the champion.

The comparison is actually a compliment to praise Messy for his
performance. Messy is compared to Maradonna, a talented football player.
Being ‘another Maradonna” is a dream of every footballer. However, in this
case, both speaker and hearer must share the same knowledge of the
compared person, or else it may lead to communication breakdown.

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3: CONCLUSION
3.1.Recapitulation
The study provides a deep insight into compliments. Firstly, it reveals the
ways to give compliments in English i.e. the types of compliments: formulaic
and implicit compliments. Secondly, the success of these compliments with
the addressees were measured i.e. what the addressee means and/or what
illocutionary aims are by giving the compliment. Finally, Vietnamese
translations of these compliments were compared to the original ones.
3.2. Concluding remarks
In the sum, the present research has found some new interesting findings
related to critical approaches to interpreting compliments.
The limited data that has been analyzed so far suggests that in the Vietnamese
translations, there appears to be a preference to compliment people on their
personal qualities rather than on their performance, yet English original
compliments focus more on performance. Besides, the verbs used in English
ones are stable verb i.e. to be, yet, in Vietnamese, action verbs are often
exploited instead.
Generally speaking, there is a marked preference for omissions and

reductions in translation, where any small change, compensated by the other
communicative codes, does not drastically affect pragmatic meaning.
Implicit compliments may be more costly to understand as they require a
good degree of shared knowledge between the collocutors, but they
certainly reduce the potential threat to the addressee’s negative face that
often emerges in the form of embarrassment in front of overt compliments,
on which occasions the complimentee tends to respond so as to downplay the
expressed praise. On the contrary, with implicit compliments the
complimentee finds it less difficult to accept the content of the assertion made
by the speaker. Moreover, in the examples of implicit compliments there is no
verbal response because the implicit structure of the speech act allows the
addressee to remain silent.
For the last research question, Vietnamese translations are quite similar to the
original ones, especially in implicit compliments, in which the structures and
word choices seem to remain the same. In explicit comments, Vietnamese
ranges of vocabulary and structure used are wider than the English ones.
More importantly, stable verbs in English compliments are often translated by
action verbs in Vietnamese.
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3.3. Limitations of the study
Though this research has been conducted to the best of the researcher’s
efforts, there remains several limitations involving the design of data collection
instrument, the participants and the scope.
Firstly, there are some limitations with the data collection instruments of
the present study. The situations in the study were just hypothetical. In terms
of the examples, the research involved only a small amount of situations.
Therefore, these ones by no means could generalize the compliments in both
languages. Also, the research did not take account of background variables such

as their personalities, gender, age or topic, which can affect their compliments.
3.4. Suggestions for further studies
For studies on the same topic, there were two suggestions as follows:
First, this research an be upgraded with more preeminent data collection
instruments such as using survey questionnaire, observation and interviews.
Questionnaire may be designed based on the result of observation, which helps
avoid hypothtical situations. Then, interviews may help to explore further
understanding.
Next, further studies should be conducted with broader target population
to increase the generalisability of the findings. Also, to enhance the validity, the
background variables such as their personalities, gender, age or topic should be
explored.

XÁC NHẬN CỦA THỦ TRƯỞNG ĐƠN VỊ

Thanh Hóa, ngày.... tháng ... năm...
Tôi xin cam đoan đây là SKKN của
mình viết, không sao chép nội dung của
người khác.
(Ký và ghi rõ họ tên)

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