Compliments and compliment responses: Grammatical structure and sequential organization. By Andrea Golato. (Studies in discourse and grammar 15.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xi, 248. ISBN 1588115992. $132 (Hb).
Reviewed by Aleksandar Čarapić, University of Belgrade
Considering that compliments and compliment responses (CRs) have been studied in twelve languages, including six varieties of English, Golato’s study Compliments and compliment responses, which adopts the methodology of conversation analysis (CA), aims to extend this work to German, analyzing the form and function of complimenting sequences in everyday spoken German. Several relevant questions have stimulated this research: What is the design of compliment turns (CTs) in German? Are they mechanical speech events as in other cultures? How is a compliment introduced linguistically into conversation and how does it emerge from the context? How do speakers refer to the object about which the compliment is made? How are compliments responded to in German? How do third parties react when someone else pays a compliment? Do compliments serve different interactional functions? What in the speech event determines the complimenting function of a turn?
The volume consists of nine chapters. Ch. 1, ‘Preliminaries’ (1–9), offers theoretical preliminaries, discusses sequence organization and the study of compliments, interaction, and grammar, and outlines the methodology and the organization of the volume. Ch. 2, ‘Methodology’ (11–25), begins with a description of the data-collection procedures that have been used in the past. It discusses (dis)advantages of the instruments of data collection (discourse completion tasks and questionnaires, role play, recall protocols, field observation, and recording of talk). The discussion additionally provides a rationale for the data-collection procedure and methodology. Ch. 3, ‘Giving compliments: The design of the first CT’ (27–84), focuses on constructions of CTs, emphasizing two elements: first, speakers who give compliments need to refer to the assessable so that the coparticipant can know what the compliment is about; and second, speakers need to address the positiveness of their compliment assertion both syntactically and semantically. Ch. 4, ‘Giving compliments: Sequential embedding and functions of the CTs’ (85–132), links the structural characteristics of compliments with overall sequence organization.
Ch. 5, ‘Compliments in multi-party interactions: Third parties providing second compliments’ (132–55), offers the analysis of various types of agreeing turns, helping us to understand the social act of complimenting and the functions of various response tokens (e.g. German response tokens and modal particles). Ch. 6, ‘Compliment responses (CRs)’ (167–99), patterned after a CA analysis of compliments in American English, concentrates on the preference organization of CRs in German and extends the analysis of CRs to the design of the CT, its function in discourse, and relations between the design of CR and function of the CT within a larger sequence. Ch. 7, ‘Concluding discussion’ (201–12), summarizes the previous findings, presents their broader implications, and discusses certain constraints of the volume, outlining possibilities for future research.
In addition to its valuable findings, subtle observations, and insightful comments, this volume is beautifully written. It is a remarkable example of scholarship and is an important contribution not only to the study of compliments and compliment responses, but also to the linguistic fields of interactional sociolinguistics, CA, (conversational) discourse analysis, contrastive analysis, pragmatics, and the like. As such, it unquestionably deserves a wide readership.