A Study on the Speech Act of Compliment Response in Persian: The Effect of Age

Compliments and their responses are of high frequency in daily speech acts and carry a special cultural-sociological load. This study aimed at identifying the effect of the variable of age on Persian speaker's compliment response strategies. To this end, 200 Persian speakers (100 women and 100 men) from four different age-groups (10-18, 19-30, 31-40, and above 40 years old) were asked to respond to the written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) consisting of four imaginary situations. The results indicated that the participants used accept strategies the most and the evade ones the least but the most common sub-type of response strategies they used was the downgrade strategy. Return and appreciation tokens were the second and third most frequently used strategies. However, topic shift and reassignment strategies were never used. The results also revealed that the effect of age on the patterns of compliment responses was remarkable. While the age-group under 18 used appreciation tokens the most, the other age-groups preferred downgrade ones the most. However were used, disagreement and reassurance strategies the least in all groups.