Revisiting Intercultural Disparities of Compliment Responses in English between Native and Non-native English Speakers

Abstract

This research reexamines the disparities in CRs expressed in English from interlocutors representing four groups: male/female NESs. and male/female NNESs. The data were gathered through a written open-ended DCT that included four settings: appearance, character, ability, and possession. Responses from the participants were categorized into the three macro-level CRs (e.g., accept, reject, and evade) using Holmes’s taxonomy for developing a framework of pragmatic transfer strategies regarding compliments offered by acquaintances. Surprisingly, the findings showed that NNESs responded explicitly/positively to compliments received during intercultural interlocution; in fact, their CR strategies were similar to those of NESs. This implies that cultural factors did not contribute heavily to the CRs of NNESs in their communication with target language users, but the intrinsic motivation of NNESs to learn a target language was more influential on CRs. This study also found that L2 language proficiency is not directly related to CRs; rather, the responses they took were habitual ones.