Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Compliments in Talk Shows in France and Iran
- Date
- Friday 10 October 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.24
Abstract
The compliment, whether expressed as an initiating move or as a response, is among the most widely studied speech acts. Numerous studies, conducted both in monolingual frameworks (de Fornel 1989; Golato 2002; Kang 2004; Marandin 1987; Traverso 1996) and in contrastive perspectives (Chen 1993; Tang and Zhang 2009; Lorenzo-Dus 2001; Spencer-Oatey, Ng and Dong 2000; Wieland 1995; Zamouri 2016), draw on the seminal work of Pomerantz (1978), Wolfson (1981), Holmes (1986, 1988), and Herbert and Straight (1989), who identified its defining features. And while the earliest studies focused on English as used across different cultural contexts, subsequent research has examined languages as diverse as Japanese (Adachi 2016), Korean (Kang 2004), German (Golato 2003, 2005), Persian (Eslami, Jabbari and Kuo 2015, 2019), and French (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1987, 2005; Traverso 1996).
The originality of this research lies first in the choice of languages and cultures under comparison, since the French-Persian pair has not yet been the subject of contrastive studies on compliments. It also focuses on a discourse genre that remains unexplored in both languages: the talk show. While studies on French have focused on conversation, research on Persian has also addressed online conversation, yet talk shows have not been examined. Furthermore, the study adopts a multimodal perspective on communication, thereby broadening the scope of analysis.
More specifically, this investigation examines the role and position of compliments within the structure of talk-show exchanges: where they occur, who initiates them, what themes they address, and how multimodality comes into play. The aim is to understand how compliments emerge and what effects they produce in French and Iranian talk shows. Although the talk-show format may appear structurally similar across cultural contexts, compliments, as a social ritual, remain highly dependent on the sociocultural environment in which they circulate.