In this paper, various strategies employed for the speech act of Compliments in Persian and English are studied and some examples of cultural misunderstandings that may happen to be troublesome in translation of Compliments exchanges in English and Persian contexts will be presented. The present study of Compliments in Persian and English shows that the use of polite expressions is mostly less positive in Persian in comparison with those of English. Moreover, Persian speakers seem to be more modest, indirect ambiguous, lengthy and obscure than the English ones. Besides, Persian speakers, unlike the English ones, as a socio-cultural norm, mostly have the tendency to leave the Compliments somewhat vague and avoid assertive statements and all these differences may bring about negative transfer in the process of translation of from L1 to L2 and vice versa. To bridge between socio-pragmatics and interpretation/translation fields, the present study will try to open perspectives on a better understanding of underlying universal social and linguistic conventions in both Persian and English cultures. Furthermore, such a study can provide us with valuable information on cross-cultural problems concerning the translation of speech act of Compliments in English and Persian and therefore prove of extremely value to both fields of Translation and TESOL.    

During the 1980s, scholars started to describe speech acts as they were manifested in speech. Using various methods including observation of naturally-occurring speech, open-ended or multiple-choice questionnaires, dialogue completion tasks, role plays, interviews, and protocol analyses, they managed to detect some pragmatic gaps between two different languages that sometimes lead to miscommunication (Yuan, 2001). In this study, the researchers have tried to investigate the common patterns of complimenting behavior among adult Persian speakers in Iran; this would include the topics, and functions of Compliments in Persian with regard to the gender and status of the interlocutors. By choosing the method of the observation of natural speech, the researchers have tried to get instances of every-day Compliments exchanged among Persian native speakers. Moreover, the results of this observation are compared with the results of several observations in the United States and New Zealand. The comparisons would help us identify some of those cross-cultural differences in the realization of Compliments, as well as the demographic features of the compliment givers and receivers.

Compliments and compliment-responses form adjacency pairs. These pairs include two utterances by two speakers in which not only the first utterance gives rise to the second utterance, but also necessitates that the second one be of a special kind. This paper studies compliment responses in Persian women and children. In the first part of this paper we present a description and classification of compliment responses in Persian speakers The second part of this paper is a comparison of Compliments responses in 60 children (aged 6-8 year) and 60 educated woman. We used the “what a nice x” pattern and then recorded all their responses. ‘X’ was one of their personal belongings. The results show a great difference between the two groups. While adults use conventional formulaic phrases as compliment response, children do not use these fixed phrases and instead give an explanation (or description) about the complimented object.

Prosody is a fundamental aspect of speech communication through which (un)truthfulness and (in)sincerity of speech can be identified. The focus of the study is on the prosodic features of (in)sincere Compliments among EFL learners. Twenty male and female EFL learners were selected through Oxford Quick Placement Test. The participants did role-plays based on situations on compliment topics and their voices were recorded in a recording studio. The produced Compliments were transferred to Praat software for acoustic analysis. Also, two native speakers (one male and one female) were requested to read the produced Compliments both in a sincere and insincere manner. Their voices were transferred to Praat software for acoustic analysis to establish the baseline of the study. The prosodic features of the participants’ voices were compared with those of native speakers to determine the (in)sincerity of the Compliments on a 5-point scale. Results showed that sincere Compliments are produced with a higher pitch. Concerning the gender of the participants, males were sincerer than females. Regarding the proficiency level of the participants, there was no significant prosodic feature in determining the sincerity of their Compliments. Both intermediate and advanced groups were similar to native speakers in giving sincere Compliments. The results of the study open up new horizons for the importance of vocal cues in evaluating sincerity in speech acts.

The authors in the present study attempt to investigate the speech act of Compliments and its semantic boundary engagement with other speech acts of positive assessment of the speaker from the listener such as "approval", "praise", and "flattery ". The hypothesis of the present study is that the semantic boundary of speech acts containing positive assessment of the speaker depending on the verbal culture of the speakers of Russian and Iranian verbal environment is different, and it is open to change in such a way that if a face expression in the Iranian cultural verbal environment is complimented, that expression may find the color and smell of flattery in the Russian verbal environment; in other words, an action with a positive assessment to an action with a negative assessment of the listener towards the speaker is interpreted as flattery. Furthermore, the compliment structures in each verbal culture have gender differences and characteristics (male and female). That is, the group of formulas used for men is inapplicable for women and vice versa.

The most important goal of language learners is to master the target language and apply it in communication situations and it is clear that culture has a profound effect on language teaching because language and culture are complementary and cannot be differentiated. “Compliments” are part of the language such that culture has a prominent role in the quality of their application in creating effective and constructive relationships between the speaker and the learner, either written or oral. However, the teaching of Arabic culture in the curriculum of teaching Arabic language to Persian speakers has not been fully considered, and - in most cases - Persian learners do not have enough ability to respond to Arabic Compliments. Therefore, the contrastive analysis of Compliments between the two Persian and Arabic languages provides a good context for learners in order to avoid making mistakes when using Arabic proclamations. Therefore, the present study has collected a coherent set of two Persian and Arabic phrases, and then examined their identical and similar as well as different elements using a descriptive-analytical method. The findings of this research show that the identical elements account for a considerable amount of the studied complications; therefore, it is expected that Iranian students will not face serious problems in learning Arabic Compliments.

Compliments (Cs) and compliment responses have been a prevailing topic of study in pragmatics due to their pivotal role in effective intercultural and transcultural interactions. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of research on Compliments in the Persian language conducted over almost about the past four decades. It summarizes key findings of Compliments in the Persian language used by Iranian speakers of Persian, discusses the significance of these findings, and speculates the future directions of research on complimenting studies on Persian language. An extensive bibliographical search on studies on this particular area yielded a database of nine studies on Persian Cs for this systematic review. After a brief exploration of the background of compliment studies done by prominent scholars in other languages, we provide a working definition of Compliments. We then examine studies to date of complimenting behavior in Persian, highlighting similarities and differences, and any emerging trends. We provide a synthesis of the research conducted in this area, the theoretical frameworks, and the methodologies used in different studies, including data collection and data analysis. Based on the review of previous studies, we speculate on some possible directions for future research in this area.

1. Introduction In the present postmodern world, so many of the biased remarks heard about one nationality or another can be traced to a failure to appreciate the different conventions of politeness and courtesy in different societies; therefore, it can be referred to as an instance of cross-cultural pragmatic failure (Mirza Suzani & Armiun, 2011). Furthermore, while a set of underlying social and linguistic conventions are assumed to exist universally in all cultures, contrastive pragmatic analysis needs two kinds of categories to contrast: one linguistic and the other sociological (Mirza Suzani, 2006). In the same vein, despite the idea that the formulaic nature of Compliments-their syntactic and lexical predictability-makes them attractive materials, probing Compliments in translation can be a troublesome aspect for language learners from different cultural backgrounds (Mirza Suzani & Armiun, 2011). Hence, the study of the speech act of Compliments in both source and target languages can be important because paying appropriate Compliments and identifying them in each culture is an aspect of communicative competence which may differ in a variety of ways from one culture to another. Moreover, Compliments are more often than not culture-specific and reflect fundamental values of the society and the accurate interpretation of illocutionary force of Compliments involves knowledge of subtle cultural norms of both source and target languages. Having considered the above points, the present research aims to investigate speech act of Compliments in Persian, English and French from a sociocultural perspective...