Compliment responses in Finnish everyday conversations: Orienting to two contradictory expectations
| Panel: | P67 - Affect and Emotion in Interaction, Part 1: Everyday Conversation |
| Author: | Halonen, Mia |
| Abstract: | |
| Complimenting praises the recipient and is an essentially affective action. In my paper I will focus on compliment responses in Finnish everyday conversations. Although complimenting appears to be a positive action, it is a two-fold one. As Pomerantz 1978 pointed out, responding to a compliment requires orienting both to the preference for agreeing with an assertion and for minimizing of self-praise. In Pomerantz’s study of American English conversations the majority of the responses were disagreeing and rejecting, yet appreciating. In 2005, Golato showed that in German conversations compliments are responded to with even an upgraded agreement. She suggests this might derive from a strong orientation to “truthfulness” in interaction in German; the respondents orient to the assertion the compliment contains and to the preference for agreeing. My study suggests this is also the case in Finnish conversations. The responses are mostly agreements varying in epistemic strength: if the compliment gets treated as news (ai kiitos ‘oh thank you’) or as something the recipient already independently thinks the same way about (eiks ookki ‘isn’t it’). Furthermore, after agreeing, the recipients orient to avoiding self-praise by providing an explanation for the object being complimented. The data consist of about 40 hours of conversations with 42 compliment sequences and of 64 written notes of complimenting sequences made by students at the University of Helsinki. The research method is sequential analysis of the conversations. |
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