Compliment responses in Vietnamese: The influence of genre and context on gender and region

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to investigate how genre and context impact region and gender in Vietnamese compliment responses (CRs) using two different sets of data. The sociolinguistic interview data were gathered through fieldwork with informal semi-structured interviews in two distinct regions of Vietnam. The talk show data were collected from two contemporary shows broadcast on national television channels. Different from previous studies, the present study focused on speakers’ reported feelings about compliments rather than on observing performance. In addition, we categorized CRs based upon observation of real language from a discourse-based perspective, which we believe may provide a fuller picture of this speech act. Regarding compliment behaviors, the results indicated that there were considerable differences in compliment behaviors in movie discourse and talk show discourse. The compliments in movie discourse most frequently performed functions of many other speech acts such as thank-you, encouragement, congratulation, flattery, or flirty, and were involved in a wide variety of topics and several conversational turns. In talk show discourse, the compliments were mainly used as conversational strategies and varied greatly depending on the content of the shows. In terms of CRs, the results showed big differences in regional and gender variation through sociolinguistic interviews but very little regional and gender variation in the two shows. The findings of the present study make a strong case for the view that people’s reported behavior in everyday life differ from people’s interactions in media contexts. Throughout the present study, we can see that the context does matter very much in giving compliments and interpreting the responses. The results of our sociolinguistic interviews do support the fact that one response form could differ in interpretation. The results of our talk show data make the case stronger as we again found that one form could perform more than one function and the same nonverbal behaviors may have different meanings. The findings of the present study may call our attention to building a new analytical framework for this speech act.