Speech Act of Responding to Compliments: A Study of Verbal Politeness Strategies of Spanish and Italians

Abstract

This paper aims to provide empirical data relating the verbal politeness strategies used by Italian and Spanish
speakers to one of the speech acts: complimenting. More specifically, the objective of the present study is to classify and
contrast the different resources used in the responses to the compliments analyzed, taking as independent variable the
nationality of the participants. The data for the investigation was collected by carrying out a corpus of 400 responses to
compliments obtained from a questionnaire in which 100 Italian and Spanish participants had to react to compliments in various
everyday situations. Afterwards, the responses were classified according to the different strategies and the percentage of the
presence or absence of the diverse typologies was determined from the answers obtained. The results reveal that both Spanish
and Italian informants utilize as a preferential resource the acceptance of the compliment, but it is observed that there are some
differences in the selection of variants of this superstrategy.