Compliment response behaviour on facebook : a gender study of compliment response speech act by iraqi facebook users

الملخص EN

Compliment and compliment responses are studied comprehensively, yet very few studies, if none, have dealt with surveying the complimenting behaviour and the gender influence on it in Iraqi Arabic.

Even less scarce is the available literature on the compliment response speech act in cyberspace communication (Facebook in particular) of Iraqi speakers.

This study on Iraqi Facebook users' behaviour in responding to compliments is conducted to widen the latitude of pragmatic studies to include eastern languages and to expand the range of speech act studies from face-to-face interaction to cyberspace interaction.

Three questions are sought in this study: (a) what compliment response structures are used by Iraqi Facebook users? (b) does gender have any impact on the behavior of Facebook users in regard to compliment and compliment responses? and (c) do male and female Iraqi Facebook users use internal or external modification in their compliment response strategies? The findings reveal that all the compliment response strategies outlined by Eslami et al (2015) are used by Iraqi Facebook users and that verbal response strategies are preferred to non-verbal strategies.

The second finding encloses that the most frequently used acceptance strategy is the appreciation strategy in the male complimentees data while returning the compliment is the most frequently used in the female complimentees data.

Finally, regarding modifying the compliment responses, the results demonstrated that both male and female complimentees give priority to external modifiers and that the gender of the complimenter plays a significant role in determining the type of modifier for both genders.