A comparative study of compliments and compliment responses in Turkish and American English regarding form and function

As one of the most common social phenomena, Compliment Speech Events have been the subject of much research in pragmatics. Since Speech Event production in a target language is important in pragmatic and communicative competence, studies conducted about Speech Events should assist teachers in practical classroom usage. Unfortunately comparative studies have been underestimated in terms of importance, especially ones concerning Turkish Compliments. Therefore the purpose of this study is to compare Compliment Speech Events of Turkish and American English both quantitatively and qualitatively. The data of this study was collected from 50 Turkish and 50 American English Compliment Speech Events using the Field Method. The interactions were analyzed based on the conventions of Conversational Analysis. The analysis involved a description of the structural and the functional aspects of Compliment Speech Events in both languages. Furthermore, it dealt with a two level analysis in the functional category, which viewed the contents of Compliment Speech Events as Discourse Acts on a higher level and Speech Acts realizing Discourse Acts on a lower level. As a conclusion of this study, it was asserted that there are 2 main categories in the structural aspect of Compliment Speech Event in both languages. These are Adjacency Pairs, which fall into Plain and Complex categories. The functional aspect of the analysis suggested that there are 5 different pairs in Turkish and 6 different pairs in American English in terms of Discourse Acts as Adjacency Pairs. On the other hand, Speech Acts realizing Discourse Acts varied greatly when compared in both languages. In light of the findings of this research, the implications of the study for ELT have been discussed.Keywords: Discourse, Interaction, Speech Events, Speech Acts, Adjacency Pairs, Compliments, Compliment Responses, Communicative Competence.