The sociology of compliment work: an ethnocontrastive study of Polish and English compliments

Abstract

The two-part speech compliment is examined in Polish from the contrastive perspective of previous work on English compliments. The primary data for analysis consist of 400 compliment events (compliment + compliment response) collected ethnographically in Poland. Both English and Polish compliments are highly formulaic, employing a small set of syntactic and semantic formulae for expression; the two formula sets reveal broad similarities and few differences in the forms used to encode compliments. There is, however, a striking difference in the relative frequencies of compliment topics in the English and Polish data, notably a very high incidence of possession compliments in Polish. This difference is tied to the ethnography of everyday life in Poland at the time of the fieldwork (1983-1988). Finally, it is suggested that the speech act of complimenting in Polish bears some important relationship to the act of congratulating, which relationship is not apparent in English