Compliments
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Growing up, most children were told by their parents to be polite. But what does it mean to be polite? In sociological and anthropological terms politeness is defined as: a way we try and interpret each other's feelings (Light 2004). One of the most critical forms of politeness is the art of compliment giving. According to Janet Holmes, "Compliments are prime examples of speech acts which notice and attend to the hearer's interests, wants, needs and goods (Holmes 116). As a class of approximately forty students, we collected data individually on various compliments that were overheard. Each student recorded three different compliments that were heard. My job was to analyze the data inputted which totaled to roughly 112 compliments. My focus and interest is primarily on differentiating between the way men and women give and receive compliments, how the giver and receiver interpret the compliment based on their gender, some of the different things that are complimented on, and how the results of the class data compare to the study that Janet Holmes conducted.
There were four different types of categories of compliments between two individuals...