Gender Effect on Compliment Exchange

Language does reflect the identities of its users and to use it in an appropriate manner is crucial for us to live our social lives. Compliment exchange, in particular, has been intriguing for me since it seems to influence our interpersonal communication tremendously. The way of proffering and receiving compliments may influence the relations of interlocutors. In addition, the seemingly compliments may function or be intended as request or sarcasm. In order to avoid the confusion, I would like to follow the definition by Holmes (1988), that is, "a compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some "good" (possession, characteristic, skill, etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and hearer." (Holmes : 446) The focus of this paper is differences in the way men and women use compliment in Japanese. The data were collected from two television talk shows-Tetsuko-no-heya (Female interviewer), Telephone-shocking in Warattemoiitomo (Male interviewer), Examination and analysis were based on power (solidarity) and face in Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory. Previous studies about gender effect on compliment behaviors in English (Holmes 1988; Herbert 1990; Johnson 1992; Bolton 1994) and in Japanese (Maruyama; 1996) will be considered and compared.