Perception of compliment responses among young adult speakers from Lombardy

Compliment responses (CRs) have been widely investigated in variational and intercultural pragmatics as sociolinguistic norms rooted in different linguistic communities. This study explores how young speakers from Lombardy (Northern Italy) perceive various dispreferred CR strategies - particularly those involving irony, self-discredit, or Discredit of the Complimenter - elicited in Eastern Piedmont (Northern Italy, bordering Lombardy) and Campania (Southern Italy). We assess whether pragmatic cues reveal regional origins in Italian compliments. We addressed three main questions: (1) the relationship between CR strategies and interactants' geographic origin; (2) how regional variation affects perceptions of communicative intent (e.g., irony, sincerity, politeness); (3) the applicability of existing politeness models to Italian regional varieties. Data were collected through an online perception-based questionnaire with 13 authentic dialogic stimuli from the Co.Cor. corpus, representing five CR strategies from Northern and Southern speakers. A total of 122 responses were gathered, including 89 from Lombard respondents, who rated each CR for perceived politeness, sincerity, irony, and social intimacy, hypothesizing speaker’s geographic origin. Findings reveal a clear in-group bias: Lombard respondents frequently attributed CRs from other regions to their own, and perceived familiar strategies as local. Regional stereotypes appear weak, as interactional norms seem shaped more by shared generational identity than by geographic origin. Politeness was associated with agreement or playful acceptance strategies, while disagreement was often judged as rude. These findings suggest pragmatic self-referentiality, whereby familiar norms are localized regardless of origin, and align more closely with Arundale’s relational model of face than with Brown and Levinson’s framework.