INVESTIGATING COMPLIMENT RESPONSE STRATEGIES IN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE UNDER THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL STATUS

Abstract

The present study seeks to investigate the effect of the social status on the use of compliment response (CR) strategies in American English and Vietnamese. To this end, two sets of data were collected with the help of a discourse completion task (DCT) illustrating twelve situational settings in which compliments were produced by ones of higher, equal, and lower status with the informants. Statistical analysis provides descriptive statistics results in terms of CR strategies on macro- and micro-level, i.e. these findings demonstrate the CR strategies of acceptance, amendment, non-acceptance, combination, and opting out. Furthermore, inferential statistics have revealed if there is a global standard in the use of CRs between American and Vietnamese native speakers. Finally, the results suggested a significant effect for the treated intervening social variable of status in determining the type of CRs.