The variability of Compliment Responses: Italian and German data. Chapter XVI

This study aims firstly to analyse differences and analogies between Italian and German in terms of answering to compliments. The investigation is based on a wide corpus of Italian and German compliment responses, classified on the base of a typologization we postulated for our research. A second goal of the study is to demonstrate how compliment varies along the axes of the so-called dia-levels, because CRs are sensitive to geographical area, gender, topics, illocutionary force; for this purpose we use authentic data we have collected in these last years. We start by presenting our corpora, defining the speech act of complimenting and describing our CRs categorization framework used to analyse and classify our data. As a second step, we compare German and Italian native speakers’ reactions to compliments according to their degree of acceptance and their topic. A particular attention has been deserved to the diatopic variation in Italy. In the last paragraph we summarize the most relevant findings of our study.