Communicating Culture through Online Compliments

Over the last decades, the expressive speech act of compliments has been the focus in quite a few studies. Most of these studies focused on the structural patterns and/or the topics of compliments. However, the excessive use of social media tools and the increase in the use of compliments in these settings made it necessary to dig into the cultural elements in compliment exchanges and analyse how the faces of self and the other are co-constructed paying the compliment and responding to it because this new mode of communication creates a setting where boundaries are vanished and borders are blurred in interpersonal communication. This cross cultural understanding can help understand how culture comes into being in online language use. Compliments in online interaction have become an important research area in different languages. However, the number of such studies is still quite very limited. This leads to overgeneralized misconceptions on compliments which undermine the cultural load of this speech act. This study, using a bilingual corpus made up of 200 compliments collected from 100 participants, analyses the cultural elements in compliment exchanges and discuss how these cultural elements reflect themselves in Turkish and American English using quantitative and qualitative data analysis