2016 IJRSLL – Volume 5 Issue 3
Author/s:
Masoumzadeh, Ali*
Kashan University, Iran (Ali.masoumzadeh64@gmail.com)
Ghanadi, Seyed Ali
Kashan University, Iran (Ali.ghanad@yahoo.com)
Abstract:
This study aims at conducting a contrastive analysis of the most frequent compliment strategies used in Iranian and British foreign minister Facebook pages. It also investigated the impact of cultural and social norms on the choice of compliment strategies in the utterances of the commentators. The data were collected through surfing the pages of both Iranian and British foreign ministers (150 tokens for each of them). Then, by using Yuan’ (2002) classification of compliment strategies, the comments were analyzed in terms of two major categories namely bound and unbound semantic formulas. Furthermore, the most frequently used compliment strategy by Facebookers on the wall of British foreign minister is explicit semantic formula while implicit patterns were highly used by commentators in Iranian foreign minister’s page. As a result, the remarkable frequency differences of these two categories reflect the influence of cultural standards on selecting various compliment strategies.
Keywords: contrastive analysis; compliment; compliment strategies; Facebooker; foreign minister; semantic formula
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrsll.2015.1243
*Corresponding Author