A GENDER-BASED ANALYSIS IN GIVING COMPLIMENT BY EFL STUDENTS

Abstract

Compliment is one kind of speech act where the speaker expresses his/her feeling toward the hearer. The present study investigates compliment strategies employed by speakers, both male and female to male and female addressees. It also attempts to see the common strategies and the syntactic patterns used by male and female EFL students in delivering a compliment. Three males and three females are chosen as the participants based on their speaking scores since the data are gathered by means of an oral discourse completion test which includes 12 items. The findings reveal that in term of compliment strategies, males employ explicit, implicit, and zero- realization strategies, while females only offer direct and zero-realization strategy. In expressing the explicit one, both males and females use the first pattern “NP looks/is (really) ADJ†more often than other patterns. Overall, the present study points out that female students are the most frequent in uttering the compliments rather than males, but there is only a slight difference among them.

Key words: gender, speech act, compliment, compliment strategy