Introduction
Below is a made up example of the type of
awkward situation that can happen when
Persians interact with non-Persians:
A (non-Persian): What a nice
bag!
B (Persian): Oh, Thank you. It
isn't worthy in front of someone
as great as you. For you! Take it
really!
A: Really?! Oh, um…thanks. I
love it.
Persians commonly make formulaic offers
such as these, but they can be misunderstood
as real offers and be accepted by people
from other cultures. The English speaker
might also feel awkward for being offered a
gift for no reason and feeling obliged to
accept to be polite.
This is an example of the use of a culture-specific compliment response in another
culture–something often experienced by
Persians, or anyone in a cross-cultural
situation–that can lead to an unsuccessful
communication experience. The Persian
speaker has transferred her/his L1 pragmatic
conventions in responding to the
compliment given by a native English
speaker, and the English speaker has
responded in the way appropriate to their
cultural background, both being unaware of
each other’s cultural norms and conventions.
Communicative interactions are highly
influenced by cultural values. As observed
by Samovar, Porter, and McDaniel (2010),
looking at cultural values is important in all
human interaction, but it is even more
crucial in intercultural communication. In an
intercultural communicative exchange,
people of different ethnic, cultural and
linguistic backgrounds usually do not have
sufficient linguistic and socio-cultural
knowledge of the language of their
interlocutor, and this may lead to conflicts,
uncomfortable interactions and/or
misunderstandings.
The first author, Motaghi-Tabari, has been
residing in Australia for several years, but
originally comes from Iran, where
complimenting is a common speech act in
people’s daily interactions. She has observed
that Australians seem not to be as
comfortable with compliments. The second
author, an Anglo-Australian, feels that it can
be due to uncertainty over how to react to
compliments. Although taught to say “thank
you”, since rejecting the compliment might
be seen as discourteous, this conflicts with a
desire not to seem immodest. Herbert (1986)
and Pomerantz (1978) also observed this
conflict.
Persians are accustomed to respond
formulaically to compliments, and are taught
such behaviour when very young, and so do
not feel this discomfort. A parent will, for
example, exhort a child who is not
responding to respond and will at times say
the words with the intonation of the child,
for example “say ‘thank you Auntie! Your
eyes see everything as beautiful!’”
The patterns of giving and receiving
compliments—like any speech act—vary
among different languages and cultures.
Lack of awareness of them can cause
problematic intercultural communication,
even for advanced learners of a second
language. Despite this, second or foreign
language classes usually focus on
differences at the lexical or morpho-syntactic level (A. Eslami-Rasekh &
Mardani, 2010; Z. Eslami-Rasekh, 2005;
Rose & Kasper, 2001), placing much less
focus on pragmatic competencies. This is
despite the fact that knowledge of pragmatic
and sociolinguistic rules of a language is
equally or more important for successful
intercultural communication, as these
pragmatic rules are closely tied to cultural
conceptualisations (Sharifian, 2001, 2003,
2004, 2005, 2008a, 2008b, 2009a 2009b,
2011; Sharifian & Palmer, 2007).
In this paper, we discuss the culturally
specific Persian politeness system and
investigate whether Persians who have been
exposed to Australian culture for a certain
amount of time are still affected by their
cultural norms in responding to compliments
in an intercultural interaction. By exploring
similarities and differences between Persians
in Iran and Persians in Australia, and Anglo-Australians, we can recognise the potential
areas for miscommunications in intercultural
interactions, and also find ways to improve
second language teaching and learning. This
type of research contributes to the area of
pragmatics and to finding ways to help L2
learners be aware of the occurrence of
misunderstanding, misjudgement and even
offence in intercultural communication and
have successful communication with the L2
native speaking community in a shorter
time.
Background of the study
Cultural schemas and miscommunication
Cultural schemas are rooted in our past
interactions. Our social and linguistic
interactions are strongly guided by the
communicative interactions we have as
children, and the cultural frameworks we
learn (Agar, 1994; Goffman, 1986). These
frameworks act as filters and affect the way
people perceive, analyse and interpret
communicative intentions. Sharifian (2005,
2011) discusses how these cultural schemas
are associated with the pragmatic aspect of
language. He claims that when interlocutors
do not share the same cultural schemas,
miscommunication is likely to take place,
even if their morpho-syntactic skills are
good.
When exposed to a new culture, people
encounter unfamiliar social rules and
interpersonal communicative norms. L2
learners, unaware of the sociolinguistic
norms of the target language, tend to transfer
their L1 sociolinguistic patterns when
interacting with native speakers of the target
language, and this leads to
miscommunications and social interaction
breakdowns (Agar, 1994; Sharifian, 2005,
2011). Chick defines sociolinguistic or
pragmatic transfer as “the use of the rules of
speaking of one’s own cultural group when
interacting with members of another group”
(1996, p. 332). Because the speakers behave
in the ways natural to their own cultures,
which may be different in the culture of their
interlocutor, there is the potential for
conflict (Carroll, 1988). In this situation,
individuals start realising the linguistic
differences, and pondering their own social
norms which used to be taken for granted;
they may then discover that these norms
seem to be inadequate for smooth
communication in the new society (Agar,
1994).
This process does not happen overnight. As
Cohen states, “acquisition of native-like
production by non-natives speakers may
take many years because the socio-cultural
strategies and the sociolinguistic forms are
not always ‘picked up’ easily” (1996, p.
409). Indeed, Triandis proposes a four-stage
process for this process of acculturation
(2000, p. 149):
Unconscious Incompetence:
Interlocutors are not aware of any
miscommunication as they assume that they
have relatively similar communicative
behaviours.
Conscious Incompetence:
Interlocutors realise there has been a
miscommunication, but are not aware of the
source.
Conscious Competence:
Interlocutors are aware of the cultural
differences that cause miscommunication
and attempt to adjust their language
behaviour.
Unconscious Competence:
Interlocutors adopt and take the new cultural
concepts for granted and so they use the new
ways of communication effortlessly.
Until new communicative patterns are
acquired, intercultural miscommunications
may occur, leading to discomfort and people
making wrong assumptions about their
interlocutors. Thus, it is important to
identify these problematic areas (Carroll,
1988). The choice of language for successful
communication across cultures necessitates
both linguistic and pragmatic knowledge of
the target language.
Politeness – the case of Persians
Whereas Brown and Levinson (1987)
discuss the universality of politeness, many
scholars acknowledge the possibility of
cross-cultural variability (Fraser, 1990;
Leech, 1983; Meier, 1995a; Sifianou, 1992).
Sifianou asserts, “in general, when we talk
about politeness, what we have in mind is
relative politeness, based on what we think
is appropriate behaviour in particular
situations. These norms, however, vary from
culture to culture” (1999, p. 29). Persian
politeness is a case in point.
The Persian politeness system is intimately
tied to a Persian culture-specific behavioural
phenomenon called taarof. Taarof
encompasses a wide range of inescapable
rituals in Persians’ interactions.
“Inescapable” in that any violation from the
maxims defined within the framework of
taarof would be considered discourteous,
rude, impolite, disgraceful and disrespectful.
Tyler, Taylor, Woolstenhulme, and Wilkins
(1978 cited in Assadi, 1980) claim that
without using taarof in Iran for social and
business interactions, communication seems
blunt and uncivil to Iranians. Many Persian
and non-Persian scholars have shown
interest in scrutinising this complex
politeness phenomena (Crystal, 1987; Davis,
2008; Hillmann, 1981; Holmes & Brown,
1987; Moosavi, 1986; Sharifian, 2005,
2008b, 2011; Sharifian & Palmer, 2007;
Wierzbicka, 1985; Wolfson, 1981). Beeman
(1986) defines taarof as the language of
politeness and praise in Persian culture, and
he claims that the notion of taarof goes back
to Persians’ religion in the pre-Islamic era–
Zoroastrian–of which one of the basic
principles is “kind words”. Persian literature
has many texts urging people to care about
others more than one’s self and not to speak
about one’s achievements (Ahmadi &
Ahamdi, 1998 cited in Sharifian, 2009).
Underlying this ritual are some Persian
culture-specific politeness features such as
adab (good manners)
, ehteram (courtesy,
respect), shaxsiat (character–positive face),
tavazo (modesty, humility), aberu (roughly
synonymous with credit or prestige–
implying the concept of face and how
people judge a person), and shekasteh-nafsi
(literally breaking self, meaning putting
oneself down).
Sharifian (2005, 2008b, 2009a, 2009b, 2011;
2007) has elaborated extensively on the
concept of taarof and the cultural schemas
shekasteh-nafsi and aberu. These politeness
The English glosses are not exact translations, but
the first author’s best attempts at matching the
Persian concepts with a similar term in English.
features underlie much communicative
behaviour of Persians, for example, the
speech act of responding to compliments.
The accompanying schemas for compliment
responses guide Persians as to whether they
should return back the goodwill of the
compliment giver, or deflect the
complimentary force and reassign it to a
third party/object like family members, God
or luck. In this way, Persians are urged to
“make use of any compliments or praise that
they receive to enhance the aberu of their
interlocutors, their family, or whoever might
have directly or indirectly contributed to a
success or achievement” (Sharifian &
Palmer, 2007, p. 42). Based on the cultural
schema of shekasteh-nafsi, there are many
formulaic expressions used by Persian
speakers to show a high degree of modesty.
An example of this kind as presented by
Sharifian is the construction ghabel nistim,
which means, “we are not worth it” (2007,
p. 44). He explains, however, that Persians
may not necessarily use the literal
translation in an intercultural
communication, but put themselves down by
using other expressions like “I don’t think
my food is cooked well”.
Compliments and compliment responses
Holmes defines a compliment as “a speech
act which explicitly or implicitly attributes
credit to someone other than the speaker,
usually the person addressed, for some
‘good’ (possession, characteristic, skill,
etc.), which is positively valued by the
speaker and the hearer” (1988, p. 486).
Compliments are, by nature, speech acts that
are usually welcomed. As such they are
regarded by many scholars as social
lubricants to maintain solidarity (Holmes,
1988; Wolfson, 1981). However,
compliments can negatively affect social
interactions. Many factors such as the
complimenter’s intention, complimentee’s
perception and cultural norms will influence
whether the compliments are perceived as a
face-threatening acts or a face-saving
behaviour (Farghal & Haggan, 2006).
Golato argues, “it is the position of a
compliment turn within the larger
interactional and sequential context that
determines its function” (2005, p. 203). She
maintains that compliments can be used to
perform actions other than complimenting—
such as “reproaching”, “criticizing” and
“interrupting—which cannot be described as
appealing to an interlocutor’s positive face.
For example, flattery when used insincerely:
it is often paid by the speaker for a specific
purpose and might be positively valued
neither by the speaker nor by the hearer.
Compliments may also be used sarcastically
to make the hearer feel uncomfortable. For
example, a man might comment
sarcastically on a newly bought car of a
friend who owes money to him, saying
‘Gee, you have a nice new car there!’
Further, compliments can sometimes be
embarrassing due to cultural differences. As
Tang and Zhang exemplify, “while ‘you
look lovely today’ may make an English
woman’s day, it may well make a Chinese
woman uncomfortable and even somewhat
resentful” (2009, p. 326). Further issues
affecting whether a compliment might be
seen as face-threatening are the concepts of
envy or “eyeing” (Brown & Levinson, 1987;
Holmes, 1988). That is, in some cultures a
compliment may be an expression of envy
by the complimenter.
Yu also maintains that compliments can be
“an act of judgement”, and so, people may
feel “uneasy, defensive, or even cynical with
regard to the compliments they receive, and
thus may have trouble responding to such
compliments appropriately” (2003, p. 1687).
For all of these reasons, compliments are a
multi-faceted speech act with various types
and features, and the acts can be regarded as
either face-saving behaviour or face-threatening (Brown & Levinson, 1987).
After a compliment speech act, the next turn
(usually) responds to that compliment in
some way and thus is called a compliment
response. It is this response that may reveal
the main function of the compliment and it
is as important as the compliment speech
act, since a proper response plays a strong
role in maintaining solidarity, and an
inappropriate response can lead to a
communication breakdown (Yu, 2003).
The compliment responding behaviour may
also differ depending on the object being
complimented. Researchers have narrowed
down compliment topics to a few main
categories. For example, Wolfson (1981),
Holmes (1988), Manes (1983) and Knapp et
al. (1984)—who studied varieties of
English—found that compliment types
mostly fell into four categories: appearance,
possessions, ability, and performance. In a
study of English and Chinese compliments,
Yu suggested a category of “other” for
examples which did not fit well into the
other four categories: such as
complimenting a person on who they are, as
in “I’d sure hate to lose you” (2005, p. 107).
Pomerantz (1978) was the first researcher to
conduct an extensive study on compliment
responses from a pragmatic perspective. In
her study of compliment responding
behaviours of Americans, she proposed that
a recipient of a compliment faces a difficult
situation in responding to the compliment: to
accept the compliment while avoiding self-praise. In order to cope with this tight spot,
compliment recipients use different
strategies to alleviate the situation:
acceptance; rejection; and self-praise
avoidance (Nelson, Al-Batal, & Echols,
1996). Building on Pomerantz’s studies,
Herbert (1986) proposed a more detailed
categorisation of compliment responses. He
studied 1062 compliment responses
collected from American students of the
State University of New York over three
years, and suggested that compliment
responses fall into twelve types, as detailed
in Table1 (Herbert, 1986, p. 79).
Since the first studies, many researchers
have conducted studies on compliment
responses from a cross-cultural perspective
and examined how different communities
use different strategies in responding to
compliments. Table 2 lists some of the
major scholars and the languages they
focussed on.
The current study
The current study investigates the
compliment-responding behaviours of
Persians in Australia in their interactions
with Australians and examines how
exposure to Australian culture affects
Persians’ choice of compliment response
strategies. Specifically, we are interested in
finding answers to the following questions:
1) Do the English compliment
responses of Persians
residing in Iran and Persians
residing in Australia differ? If
so, how?
2) Do the English compliment
responses of Persians
residing in Australia and
monolingual Anglo-Australians differ? If so,
how?
3) What does this level of
difference have to say about
the effect of exposure to a
culture on pragmatic
performance?
Methodology
In this study, we build on the methodology
used in Sharifian’s 2005 study, though with
some modifications. Firstly, we analyse the
effect of exposure to the Australian
community by analysing the compliment
responses of Persian speakers in Australia as
well as in Iran; and secondly, we control for
an equal amount of compliment types for the
data elicitation tool. Following Wolfson
(1981), Holmes (1988), Manes (1983) and
Yu (2005), we used five types or topics of
compliments: appearance, skill/ability/talent,
performance/achievement,possession/belong
ings, and personality (which we thought
might inspire different compliment
responses). We first discuss the participants,
then the elicitation tool used, and finally the
method of analysis.
Participants
Three parallel data sets need to be compared
for this type of study: the learners' L1 data;
the same learners' inter-language data; and
the data by native speakers of the target
language (Kasper, 1992). Thus, we gathered
data from the following groups:
Persians in Iran speaking in
English
Persians living in Australia as
they would interact with
Australians in English
Anglo-Australians in
Australia
For the Persians’ L1 data we relied on
previous studies in the literature as well as
the first author’s native speaker knowledge.
In total, there were thirty adult
participants—five males and five females in
each of the three groups. All of the
participants had at least a high school
diploma or equivalent and were more than
thirty years-of-age. The first group consisted
of ten Persians living in Iran with little or no
experience of living in any English speaking
country, but with sufficient English
knowledge to fill in the questionnaire.
Considering the variation of cultural
behaviours among Persians based on
geography, all the participants in Iran were
selected from Tehran or those who have
lived in Tehran for over ten years. The
second group–the main focus of this
research–consisted of ten Persians who had
been living in Australia for at least five to
ten years, and who had at least a medium
level of interactions with Australians; that is,
they either worked or socialised with
Australians, or did both. Finally we had a
control group of ten Anglo-Australians, who
were all born in Australia. Table 3 shows the
spread of participants in this study.
Data elicitation: a discourse completion
task
Data was collected via a Discourse
Completion Task (DCT) designed and used
by Sharifian, though with some
modifications. Sharifian’s methods were
replicated in part to enhance the ease of
comparison of our data set with his, though
also because of the advantages of DCTs.
Namely, a DCT allows researchers to
control variables, narrow down the scope of
the research and obtain quantitative data in a
short time frame. Like all research methods,
there are weaknesses to DCTs—for
example, DCT responses do not always
correspond to natural data (Golato, 2003)—
however, given the constraints of this
project, a DCT was the most effective tool
for data collection.
The DCT we used was comprised of fifteen
scenarios involving the compliment speech
act. These scenarios are listed in Appendix.
We controlled for topics by ensuring there
were 3 compliments to be responded to for
each of the five compliment types (Yu,
2005):
appearance
skill/ability/talent
performance/achievement
possession/belongings
personality
In order to have an even spread of questions
from each topic area, two questions were
removed from Sharifian’s DCT and seven
were added. Table 4 below shows the
modifications made to his questionnaire.
In addition, we added introductory questions
to ascertain some important social and
linguistic information about each
participant: gender; length of stay in
Australia; and level of contact with
Australians.
Data analysis
Responses to each question from each
participant were coded for the following
factors:
Category of response, using
Herbert’s taxonomy (1986). When
participants responded with more
than one type of compliment
response, we scored each type they
used.
Types of Compliments being
responded to (of the five
categories)
Gender of speaker
Thus, the dependent variable was category
of compliment response, using Herbert’s
taxonomy (1986). The main independent
variables were:
Compliment type (appearance,
skill, performance, possession,
personality)
Nationality: Persians in Iran,
Persians in Australia, and Anglo-Australians.
A secondary independent
variable was Gender (male,
female).
Results and Discussion
In this section, the findings from the three
sets of data are analysed based on Herbert’s
taxonomy (Herbert, 1986). We will first
discuss the results from a macro-perspective: in terms of agreement versus
non-agreement of responses across all
compliment types; and then we analyse the
types of agreement used. Next, we look at
the results in more detail according to type
of compliment being responded to. Finally,
we look at how the participants responded to
the entire compliment topics in more detail.
Overall, we had 670 compliment responses;
removing 4 problematic answers (that were
ambiguous for coding) we were left with
666 compliment responses across all
participants. Thus, the sample size for this
project was small. Statistical significance
was not tested for, so as such we offer only
general comments on the data.
Macro analysis of all compliment
responses
From a macro-pattern perspective, we can
see that all three groups strongly favour
agreement strategies when responding to
compliments.
In Figure 1 we see what percentage of
responses were agreement, disagreement or
other by each group of participants, as a
proportion of all responses from that group.
We can see that both groups residing in
Australia were more likely to use agreement
than the Persians in Iran. Although the
Persians in Australia responded with slightly
more agreement than the Anglo-Australians,
this is likely due to small sample size. These
findings thus give weight to Sharifian’s
claim that Persians have a strong tendency
to deny or downplay a compliment in line
with the cultural schema of shekasteh-nafsi.
Additionally, the difference between
Persians in Australia and Persians in Iran
gives weight to the claim that cultural norms
are negotiated and re-negotiated across time
and space (Sharifian, 2008b).
When analysing those responses that were in
the macro category of agreement, we see
that the three groups differed in the
strategies for agreement used. Between 70-75% of all agreement responses were
categorised as acceptance for all three
groups. Further, when using agreement
methods apart from acceptance, all three
groups are most likely to transfer the credit
of a compliment. Figure 2 illustrates,
however, that Persians in Iran do this more
often than either group living in Australia.
Additionally, both groups living in Australia
responded with a comment history more
frequently than the Persians in Iran. The
difference between the two groups of
Persians can likely be attributed to two
reasons: the Persians’ assimilation into the
new communicative norms in Australia; and
their increased English language efficiency.
Interestingly, when looking at the
compliment responses using a transfer
strategy, the two groups of Persians more
commonly returned the compliment force to
their interlocutor, whereas the Anglo-Australians more often re-assigned the credit
to someone not present. Although only
speculation, this may be due to Australian’s
discomfort with compliments because of the
conflict of not disagreeing while
maintaining modesty (Herbert, 1986;
Pomerantz, 1978).
We now consider the findings with respect
to each of the five compliment types,
presenting both quantitative and qualitative
data.
Micro-analysis by compliment type
Responses for compliments on appearance
Approximately half of the respondents from
all three groups responded with an
appreciation token to start their response for
compliments on appearance. Of responses
that were not appreciation tokens, there were
some similarities and some differences
between the groups. The findings are shown
in Figure 3.
Anglo-Australians used reassignment in
response to appearance compliments more
frequently than either of the other two
groups. Australian females in particular had
a higher tendency to use reassigning
strategies wherever possible, compared to
Persian females in both groups. Persians in
Australia more often used questioning
responses, such as “really?” or “Am I?” In
the case of “new haircut” in which a third
party could be imagined by the participants,
this difference was more conspicuous. For
this scenario, most of the Anglo-Australian
females tended to directly reassign the
compliment to the hairdresser by saying, for
example, “my hairdresser Ross does a good
job”; however, the Persian women in Iran
and in Australia usually responded with a
question. The Anglo-Australian and Persian
males, on the other hand, had more similar
patterns of distribution for reassignment,
questioning and comment history as in “I
just got it done for 20$”.
Humour was also used—particularly by
Anglo-Australian males—as a means to
implicitly disagree with the compliment
(disagreement strategy) and mitigate the
complimentary force, as in “I think you have
drunk too much John!” This may be
indicative of a higher degree of discomfort
with appearance compliments in Anglo-Australian males' compared to Persian
males.
The difference in responding to appearance
compliments between Persians in Australia
and Anglo-Australians supports the claim
that the acquisition of communicative norms
of the target community may take many
years as the socio-cultural and
sociolinguistic norms are not always picked
up easily (Cohen, 1996). Though it is
important to remember that the sample size
is small; in addition when looking at each
type of compliment being responded to, we
are dealing with only a fifth of all
compliment responses elicited. These
observations are thus preliminary in nature.
Responses for compliments on a skill,
ability, or talent
For compliments of skill, ability or talent,
Australians tended to reassign the
complimentary force where possible, as they
did for compliments of appearance. For
example, in responding to a compliment on
cooking, many Anglo-Australians attributed
the complimentary force to the recipe, and
for a compliment on handwriting to their
mother. Persians in Iran used more
disagreements or scale downs than Persians
in Australia. This also can be attributed to
shekasteh-nafsi which bans people from
speaking about one’s “I” and achievements
(Sharifian, 2005, 2008a). Persians who have
not been exposed to another culture are
likely to be highly affected by this cultural
schema. Most Persians in Iran will
insincerely disagree with compliments to
avoid self-praise. Anglo-Australians also
tend to use disagreement, but it appears to
happen mostly in situations where they
genuinely mean to disagree. Persians in
Australia, on the other hand, seem to use
more comment acceptance and less
disagreement strategies. This preference
could be a result of assimilation. However, it
seems that the original norms of the target
community are sometimes overshot. Some
of the Persians commented on their
questionnaire that they attributed
disagreement to being very Persian and thus
avoided it to sound more like a native
English speaker.
Responses for compliments on performance
or achievement
Figure 4 shows the responses used by all
three groups for compliments on
performance or achievement. From the data
we can see that Anglo-Australians and
Persians in Australia used slightly more
comment acceptances compared to Persians
in Iran. Comment history is another strategy
used the most by Anglo-Australians and the
least by Persians in Iran. This, as described
above, is likely due to the constraint of
shekasteh-nafsi as well (Sharifian, 2005,
2008a, 2011).
The data in Figure 4 show that there is a
difference in using reassignment in response
to performance compliments by the three
groups, based on the power differential
between the complimenter and the
responder. In the scenarios based on
performance or achievement, the
compliments were given by a teacher, a
mother and a friend. Although overall the
results look similar, when looking at the
individual scenarios, we see that the
Persians in Iran did not use comment
acceptance or reassignment in response to
compliments on their achievements given by
a teacher or their mother; however, they
would when responding to a friend. This
could reflect the influence of social factors,
such as position, power and solidarity on the
choice of compliment responding strategies.
Anglo-Australians, on the other hand,
seemed much more comfortable in accepting
the performance compliment given by a
teacher.
As for the Persians in Australia, although
they showed more inclination to accept the
compliments given by a teacher or their
mother compared to Persians in Iran, they
nevertheless more often accept the
compliment from a friend on their
achievements rather than a teacher or
mother’s.
These differences illustrate the way that
cultural conceptualisations of social
relations manifest themselves in language
choices. Further research on a larger pool
and taking into account social relations
would illuminate this issue further.
Responses for compliments about
possessions or belongings
Persians in Iran often offer the physical
object of a compliment to a complimenter.
This is classified as “other interpretations–
Request” by Herbert (1986). Herbert (1986)
asserts that the compliment recipients use
this type of response when they perceive the
complimenter’s comment as a request and
not a compliment. We maintain that Persians
offer the object of compliment not
necessarily because they perceive the
compliment as a request, but due to a
Persian culture-specific politeness system
called taarof. In line with taarof, Persians
use a formulaic expression ghabeli nadareh
which means, “it does not have any value in
front of someone as nice as you, so you can
take/have it”. Interestingly, Persians in Iran
tended to transfer this formulaic expression
into their English responses, whereas,
Persians in Australia avoided offering the
object, presumably because they have
realised its culture-specificity.
Persians in Iran also tried to transfer the
Persian formulaic responses into their
English responses in order to return the
compliments. For example they used
formulaic expressions like “your eyes see it
as beautiful” (in the case of “a new car”) or
“[the] presence of friends makes it much
more beautiful for me” (in the case of a new
house). Anglo-Australians, on the other
hand, tended to use disagreement and
scaling down as their most common type of
response to compliments about possessions.
Examples of this type are:
Disagreement to “You have a
very smart child.”
Anglo-Australian: I am not sure
about that, but she has some
other great strengths.
Scale Down to the compliment
“You have a very nice car”.
Anglo-Australian: Thank you.
It’s leased!
All three groups also used praise upgrade.
However, their intention for using it
appeared to differ. Only one Persian in Iran
used praise upgrade, but it appeared to be in
a humorous way, in order to redress the
force of the compliment. An Anglo-Australian and a Persian in Australia
genuinely upgraded the force of
compliments given to their car. The
examples below can imply these different
intentions.
A: you have a very smart child!
B: It’s in our genes! (haha)
A: you have a very nice car!
B: we should go for a drive so
you could see and feel the
performance. It is great!
Responses for compliments on personality
Both Persian groups—in Australia and in
Iran—are much more likely than Anglo-Australians to acknowledge and return
compliments on personality. Anglo-Australians, on the other hand, mostly tend
to evade the force of compliment by
ignoring the main compliment, when
possible. For example, in reply to the
compliment, “what am I going to do without
you?! I’ll hate not having you around!
You’re such a good friend!” most of the
Australians responded only to the first part
“what am I going to do without you?” as if
to find a way to solve this problem and did
not acknowledge the main compliment “you
are such a good friend”. Some examples of
responses are:
Anglo-Australians:
- OK, I’ll email you and anyway,
I’ll be back soon.
- I’ll be back. Call me while I’m
gone if you want to chat.
Persians:
- That’s sweet; I’ll miss you too!
- Thank you, you were the same
for me, you are such a good
friend too.
Most Persians acknowledged and responded
the main compliment by an appreciation
token and return and even with a heightened
return as in “I’ll miss you too; I’ll miss you
so much”. This difference gives weight to
our intuitions that Persians are more
accustomed to and comfortable with
compliment speech act and responding to
compliments than Anglo-Australians.
Micro-analysis by response category
In order to have a better idea of how the
three groups differed, we carried out a more
in-depth analysis on their responses to all
compliments.
Table 5 shows that overall there are some
differences between the groups. Most of
these differences seemed to occur when
participants were disagreeing with the
compliment. As no tests of statistical
significance have been carried out, we
cannot know which differences are
significant. However, we have bolded the
font of the figures that have a difference of
4% or more between the groups.
For example, both groups in Australia gave
a comment history just under 7% of the
time, whereas the Persians in Iran did so just
under 2% of the time. In addition, 4.7% of
Anglo-Australians didn’t acknowledge a
compliment, whereas this occurred in only
2.4% of Persians in Iran, and 0.9% of
Persians in Australia. A plausible reason for
the latter difference is the conflict Anglo-Australians feel between maintaining
modesty, while not rejecting a compliment.
More research is needed in this area to test
this hypothesis.
According to the figures shown in Table 5,
all three groups tended to say “thank you” or
appreciation token of this kind in response
to compliments on appearance, ability,
performance, possession, and personality.
Because saying an appreciation token was
by far the highest response type, we
removed this from the data. Table 6 presents
the participants’ most preferred response
type—as a proportion of all of their
remaining responses (after removing the
appreciation tokens from the data).
It is apparent from the data analysed here
that a higher exposure to the target culture
can have a positive effect on assimilation.
However, as discussed, there is still a
potential for miscommunication between the
Anglo-Australians and Persians–even those
with higher levels of contact with Anglo-Australians.
Conclusion
Returning to the first of our research
question, the compliment responses of
Persians residing in Iran and those in
Australia did differ; our results revealed that
Persians in Iran are more likely to use a
disagreement strategy than those in
Australia. However, both groups still
preferred agreement than any other strategy.
Within agreement strategy, Persians in
Australia used comment acceptance more
often than those in Iran, while Persians in
Iran more often returned the compliment to
their interlocutor than Persians residing in
Australia. However, there were ways in
which the two groups of Persians performed
more similarly to each other than the Anglo-Australians: for example they disagreed with
a question more often than Anglo-Australians. The results also revealed that
while Persians in Iran tended to use request
strategy–offering the object of compliment–
none of the Persians in Australia did so.
We then look at whether Persians in
Australia perform the same as, or differently
to, monolingual Anglo-Australians. Again,
there were both differences and similarities.
Patterns of agreement were more similar for
the groups residing in Australia than the
Persians in Iran, commenting on the history
of the complimented object frequently, and
returning a compliment less often. Both
groups also used comment history and
comment acceptance to a greater degree and
disagreed to a lesser degree. Some of the
differences were a disinclination to simply
not acknowledge a compliment and a greater
use of questioning as a response to a
compliment.
So, what does this level of difference have
to say about the effect of exposure to a
culture on pragmatic performance? The data
presented here—while only from a small
sample—is consistent with the view that
Persians who have lived in Australia for a
considerable period of time and had some
contact with Australians begin to respond to
compliments similarly to Anglo-Australians,
despite continuing to have some differences
in their frequency of compliment response
type choices. This suggests that exposure to
a new culture influences the pragmatic skills
of ESL learners which can in turn help with
assimilation; however, the role of teachers
and ESL classes in teaching also could be
vital, as even the Persians with high level of
contact with Australian natives, have shown
differences in using some compliment
response types. This can be indicative of the
fact that being exposed to the new
community on its own does not necessarily
help the non-native speakers acquire
pragmatics of the target language (Bouton,
1994; Rose & Kasper, 2001). By teaching
pragmatic and the sociolinguistic aspects of
the target language, ESL/EFL teachers can
help learners in the new community use
socially appropriate language in their
interactions with the native speakers in a
shorter period of time.
As we see from the results of this research,
the interlocutors’ choice of language is
affected by their cultural norms. Research of
this type, not only help to raise the
awareness of speakers of a language of their
different sociocultural and pragma-linguistic
norms, but also can be used as guidelines for
ESL pedagogical purposes.
Limitations and suggestions for further
research
This research project had a very small
sample size research. The results may not,
therefore, be generalised to the whole
population of the speech communities under
study. Future research on a larger scale
would be beneficial so that tests of
significance could be carried out and the
results thus generalised.
Further research could also include several
other independent factors in the analysis:
gender of imagined interlocutors, age of
participants, length of stay and level of
contact with Australians, and issues of
power and solidarity. Although we gathered
data from an even number of male and
female respondents, we did not specify the
gender of the person with whom they were
communicating. To do so, four sets of data
would need to be gathered: female
responding to a female; female to male;
male to male; and male to female. Age is
also an influential factor in the choice of
language. Due to resource limitations, the
participants in this study were all chosen
from the thirty years of age and above.
Further research could elicit compliment
responses from participants in different
generations to identify any differences
Length of stay and level of contact with
locals would need to be taken into account
in a larger study. Because of the
confounding of these two factors, and the
small number of participants in this study,
we simply chose only participants who had
been living in Australia for at least five
years, and had at least a medium to high
level of interaction with Australians. It
would be worthwhile to study groups who
were here for more and less time. Finally,
this study did not include the social
variables of power and solidarity. However,
the analyses of compliment responses
revealed that these variables could affect the
participants’ choice of language. Further
studies may demonstrate the effects of these
variables on compliment response types.
