Gender differences in complimenting strategies with special reference to the compliment response patterns of Hungarian undergraduate students

After a brief overview of the literature on complimenting strategies, we present the results of research aimed at finding gender-based differences in compliment response strategies based on Hungarian undergraduate students’ responses to discourse completion tasks. We found that in native language contexts, the patterns of the use of macro compliment response strategies are similar to those in previous research based on native speakers of English, however, female respondents participating in our research used more Agreement macro CRs in response to female compliments than to male ones, while male respondents offered Agreement macro strategies to male and female compliments with close to equal frequency. We have also found gender-based differences in the patterns of micro CR strategies as well as differences between Hungarian and EFL responses that are either due to misperceptions about native English norms or the lack of positive pragmatic transfer.