Politeness strategies in the expression of compliments: an analysis based on film dialogues

Abstract

Brown and Levinson (1978 [1987]) affirm that a compliment threatens the interlocutor’s negative face. This paper explores the extent to which this applies for the body of interactions that I analyze. I offer a technical notion for the compliment as a speech act and apply the theoretical model that these authors propose. I examine Mexican film dialogs on the assumption that film productions contain a cultural trace of the society in which they are produced. Of a total of 80 compliments, 75% are based on the politeness direct strategy that comes into play at the least threat to the interlocutor’s negative and positive face. Concurrently, I observed that a compliment acts on the hearer’s positive face in almost all of the cases. In this corpus Brown and Levinson’s affirmation is not sustained.