2.2 The evolution of compliment

This is in accordance with Old German in which the term "compliment" "is a far more comprehensive term embracing oral, written and even non-verbal interaction rituals for everyday and ceremonious communication situations". Speech acts like greetings and farewells, congratulations and condolences, and even requests and thanks, are included in compliments. Beetz extends the term to "all forms of initiating and maintaining contact such as introducing oneself and others, regards, recommendations, invitations, announcements, invitations to dance, good wishes, promises, offers of service, presentations, apologies; even 'reprimand compliments' are not considered to be a contradiction in terms". The same applies to the semantic history of the English word "compliment". It is a general term including other speech acts in the early periods. Evidence can be found e.g. in the following uses of the word in English literature and early English newspapers.

they paid each other the common Compliment of a Good-morrow, and then went to breakfast.

This Girl, notwithstanding her Country-Simplicity, knew a Compliment was expected from her on this Occasion.

The 3d Instant the Queen of Spain began to receive the Compliments of Condoleance for the Death of the late King.

Cardinal Gabrieli, is by the intercession of the Popes Sister, dispenced with from his journey to his Residency, for which favour he has paid his Compliments, and is now Treating for the Purchase of the Lands of Fiano, belonging to Prince Ludovisio.

The compliment in the first sentence consists of a polite and perhaps somewhat formal greeting. In the second sentence a polite response is designated as a compliment, and the formulation makes it clear that, according to the writer, there is a certain contrast between country simplicity and the formality of a compliment. It is noteworthy if a simple girl from the country knows when a compliment is required.

The use of the term "compliment" in early newspapers likewise highlights the formal and indeed diplomatic aspect of this speech act. In the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the term "compliment", as it is used in ZEN, referred exclusively to acts of diplomacy. Compliments were an important part of international politics. Representatives of a state paid appropriate compliments to the dignitaries of another state. Royals, the Pope, or other members of the nobility were often the recipients of compliments. From the examples it can be deduced that these compliments were always an expression of good wishes and good intentions. Particularly frequent were compliments on the coronation of a new king or the accession of a dignitary to a high office. Welcome compliments were also frequent, as were compliments of condolence [16, 47].

The modern conception that compliments are often not entirely true, and that some doubt is present, is found in some early examples as well.

Did he like your pronunciation? Yes Sir, but I believe it was but by way of Complement

In all examples of this type are numerous in our material. A quotation from an English etiquette book, The Academy of Complements makes the point about the inclusiveness of the term and ties compliments to the norms of the upper classes. It is evident that the speech community sharing the rules for conduct and interpretation displayed in these handbooks was the small elite at the top of the social hierarchy:

Complements are a short collation of Sweetmeats, to banquet and please the daintiest taste; they are the quintessence of wit, the refiners of speech, and fit the mind better then the apparel doth the bopy: for the cloaths may be too strait, or point device; but complements are the minds free exercise. .the moral of which is, That Wit and Women are fraile things, gilded hypocrites, specious out- sides; to which Complements, like feathers to small birds, make a proportion, though the body itself be but little. They are multiplying-glasses, and flattering Mirrors, that conceal age and wrinkles ... A complementive Submission, is the Flatterers and Politicians Key to open the most secret Cabinets of Princes breasts with.; The preface to a Complement is the motion of the body; the grace of it, the disposing of the countenance;. Complements are the language of Gallants (the meltings of their language) the musical ravishings of their perswasive tongues, the odours of their perfumed breaths; loving sighs, and the business of their afternoons.

Etiquette books in Early Modern English contain model dialogues giving advice on how to approach people of high rank, the King, the Queen, noblemen, how to initiate polite requests, and how to behave in polite society. These dialogues were probably learned by heart, and model answers are also given. Compliments belonged to the social practices of people of high rank. Ways of engaging in those activities had to be taught, and how these social activities became part of polite behavior lower down on the social scale must have been related to increasing literacy and growing prosperity among the middle classes [17, 62].

Genres that build on compliments and related speech acts are found in the written form in the history of English, and the speech act of complimenting can be traced in the written culture of past periods from the late medieval period onwards. According to genre theory, new genres of writing are created to meet the cultural needs of discourse communities. In Early Modern culture, metatextual genres like prefaces and epilogues became important as they were addressed to patrons on whose benevolence the authors of the texts had to rely for their source of livelihood. Prefaces are already found in some medieval texts, but they grow in volume and importance in the sixteenth century, and it became customary to addresses the patron and the readers in separate prefaces. Addresses to the patron build on compliments and humiliative speech acts in classical styles, as defined by ars dictaminis as appropriate for addressing people of high rank. In the early material, the rhetorical eloquence of compliments follows the models of the French courtly practices with highly formulaic patterns. Speech act sequences are of interest here. In addition to the compliment phrases with praise and flattery, they contain self-humiliative expressions as part of the formula. Examples of this pattern can be found even earlier in the literature. The genre of complaint poetry is perhaps the outmost development of the tradition with its elaborate address in which face enhancing acts are accompanied by humiliative speech formulae. Chaucer transferred this genre into courtly poetry in English.

Humblest o herte, highest of reverence,/ Benygne flour, coroune of virtues alle, Sheweth unto youre rial excellence/ Your servaunt, yf I durste me so calle.

Compliments have been described as social moves that live in the landscape of evaluation, conveying positive appreciation of some thing or action for which the addressee may be credited; compliments inhabit the positive landscape while criticism and insults occupy the negative scene. This definition is very much in line with our theoretical point of departure of pragmatic space with various dimensions in which we placed insults and verbal aggression. In this paper we focus on face-enhancing acts. Recent research on compliments builds on Holmes' well-established definition:

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 the hearer [18, 43].

Thus, there are three crucial elements that pertain to a modern compliment: the target of the compliment, i.e. a "good" in Holmes' terminology or an "assessable" in the terminology of Golato; a target to whom this good or assessable is attributed (usually the addressee) and a positive evaluation. A typical example would be extract, in which Alison pays a compliment to Franca on her beautiful looks.

Alison had seized hold of Franca's long plait of dark hair and drawn it out from behind the chair. She began to unplait the end of it, moving her own chair closer. Franca watched. "Franca, you are so beautiful, like an Indian."

In some cases, Present-day compliments concern a third person and not the addressee directly, but in such cases, there is always a direct link between the positively evaluated person and the addressee that transfers the positive evaluation to the second person (see below).

We take the above definitions as our point of departure and define compliments as speech acts pointing out pleasant and agreeable things about the addressee or something or someone connected with the addressee. Compliments belong to a group of speech acts of verbal kindness, they are moves of positive evaluation and approval. Their place in the pragmatic space of speech acts is in the same dimension as flattering, praise, admiration, commendation, recommendation, accolade, and words of appreciation. We do not propose a definition which successfully discriminates between these closely related speech acts, but we see compliments as a fuzzy speech act category with overlapping areas, with different speech acts intertwining and merging. Some attempts can be made to distinguish between neighboring speech acts, e.g. praising someone not present is possible, but complimenting requires the presence of the target; praise may become a compliment if a connection exists. Speech acts can be interpreted in various ways by different viewers, showing situational variation according to the context of utterance and the people involved in the act of communication.

In the pragmatic space of speech acts, the positive end of the dimension is inhabited by compliments, and the negative end by insults. The distinction between a compliment and an insult can sometimes be difficult to make (see the examples below) because both of them are used to assess the addressee either positively or negatively. Negotiation of meaning is often needed for clarification, and even then it may remain ambiguous. Background assumptions are brought into play in interpreting what certain words and utterances in a particular context mean. Moreover, speaker illocutions may vary from sincere and honest to playful, ironic and sarcastic. Compliments are particularly susceptible to additional implicit meanings.

The difficulties in interpreting compliments have lead Eckert and McConnell-Ginet to classify compliments into three different categories: routine, sarcastic and deceptive compliments. Routine compliments are those described in definitions, whereas the sarcastic compliment "does something like mime an apparent compliment in order to mock it". Sarcastic intent is easy to miss, and sincere hyperbolic compliments are very similar in many respects. Insincere compliments, which form the third type, do not maintain the literally expressed positive evaluation. This is also true of sincere hyperbolic and sarcastic compliments, but the third type can be further characterized by the self-interested want to enhance the complementee's good opinion not as an end but as a means to some other goal. "Flattering" would be the right label in many cases. The distinctions between the categories are not clear [19, 30].

Some authors of fiction and drama are known for their skill in the field of ironic and sarcastic compliments, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) being a case in point. His plays contain witty exchanges of words with sarcastic overtones that reverse the literal meanings in the way described above. The following passages are among the best examples of this kind of language use in English literature. Examples contain compliments and sweet words, not to be taken at their face value:

WENDOLEN Cecily Cardew? [Moving to her and shaking hands. What a very sweet name! Something tells me that we are going to be great friends. I like you already more than I can say. My first impressions of people are never wrong. CECILY How nice of you to like me so much after we have known each other such a comparatively short time. Pray sit down.

The audience catches the shades of meaning, as the patterns are familiar, though the examples come from the late nineteenth century. For more remote periods, it may be difficult to catch such overtones, but fictional texts have the advantage of including narratorial comments that explicate speaker illocutions or perlocutionary effects for us.

Skilful authors can exploit the resources of language at the level of speech acts as well as at, for example, traditionally acknowledged levels of stylistic lexical and syntactic choices. The following extract from Pride and Prejudice, for instance, is an intricate network of speech acts, explicated by metatext. Mr Collins' address to Elizabeth forms a succession of compliments and insults, self-praise and humiliative speech acts. The sequence becomes a character portrait of a pompous hypocrite:

My dear Miss Elizabeth, I have the highest opinion in the world of your excellent judgment in all matters within the scope of your understanding but permit me to say that there must be a wide difference between the established forms of ceremony amongst the laity, and those which regulate the clergy; for give me leave to observe that I consider the clerical office as equal in point of dignity with the highest rank in the kingdom - provided that a proper humility of behavior is at the same time maintained. You must therefore allow me to follow the dictates of my conscience on this occasion, which leads me to perform what I look on as a point of duty. Pardon me for neglecting to profit by your advice, which on every other subject shall be my constant guide, though in the case before us I consider myself more fitted by education and habitual study to decide on what is right than a young lady like yourself.

Insincere compliments are used as self-interested strategic moves, and they are often difficult to distinguish from routine compliments. In the following passage the influence of compliments is explicated and alternative strategies are weighted:

At her next visit to Wellwood House, I went so far as to say I was glad to see her looking so well. The effect of this was magical: the words, intended as a mark of civility, were received as a flattering compliment; her countenance brightened up, and from that moment she became as gracious and benign as heart could wish - in outward semblance at least; and from what I now saw of her, and what I heard from the children, I knew that in order to gain her cordial friendship, I had but to utter a word of flattery at each convenient opportunity; but this was against my principles; and for lack of this, the capricious old dame soon deprived me of her favour again, and I believe did me much secret injury.

Compliments show a great deal of variation, and have developed various subcategories. Besides the sarcastic and the insincere compliment, other, more minute classifications can be made. Several types are mentioned in a play from 1843, in which the different kinds of compliments are discussed by a polished and well-versed Frenchman, described as "this high-flown hussey" in an aside by another character in the play. The passage itself is ironical and mocks French polite society, the model of English court culture and upper class behavior including social practices like complimenting [20, 73]:

I am engaged in a work of great research, to be entitled - "On the proper application of the Art and Science of Compliments." I shall treat of compliments in all their branches, from their first origin; beginning with that paid by the serpent to Eve, in Paradise, and so downwards.

To embark in a compliment with due refinement requires the greatest skill, judgment, prudence, forethought, and delicacy of imagination. There are many various kinds of compliments; each demands almost a life-time to study it properly. There is the compliment direct and the compliment indirect; there is the compliment defensive, and, sometimes, the compliment offensive - most beautiful Lady Geraldine.

Participant observation and discourse completion tasks are beyond the reach of historical pragmaticians, but there are other means of gathering authentic data. For retrieving the empirical material for this study, we relied on electronic corpora and used various methods to collect the examples.

We started our historical study by tracing positive evaluations in corpus materials, including the newly available A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560-1760. For locating compliments of the modern type, we made corpus searches with various lexical items gleaned from the word list of positive evaluations like the above-mentioned adjectives beautiful, nice, great, lovely and lexical strings like really nice, really great, well done, like/love your, what a, you look/re looking (see above). It turned out that most searches served to locate passages with amorous talk and courting scenes, which are not included in this study. This exercise was not as fruitful as we had hoped, but it yielded us the best examples of compliments in historical discourse, not labeled as such but exhibiting all their characteristics. The attempts to locate compliments with the above lexical items proved extremely time consuming and labor intensive, as the lexical items are frequent and only few of the occurrences reveal compliments [21, 90].

A better alternative for corpus searches of compliments for our present survey was to revert to the "ethnographic" method that had proved fruitful in studying insults in a large electronic database, as the results revealed what was considered insulting in the Victorian era. Following the same line of argumentation, we can assume that the method reveals the opposite behavior: what was considered proper and polite, particularly in association with gender. We decided to focus on the speech act labels compliment, compliments, complement, complements (with various spelling forms), to discover what people in past periods labeled as "compliments". This method seemed particularly relevant for the purpose of this study as the aim of these searches was to locate relevant passages for qualitative assessment. The labels of speech acts are often used to negotiate illocutions and perlocutions, thus revealing the neighboring speech acts. Such passages may or may not contain the actual wordings of compliments and compliment responses.

An "ethnographic" study with key lexical items can successfully be performed only in large corpora; in smaller databases the examples are too few to allow conclusions. Our assumption was that, in an optimal case, examples detected by this method would give us insights into the emergence of the personal type of compliment in the history of English. In our earlier speech act study on verbal aggression, we used the Chadwyck-Healey on-line Corpora of fiction and drama from various periods to achieve an ethnographic view of what was considered insulting and caused verbal aggression. In this study we decided to make use of the same material. As mentioned earlier, Manes and Wolfson argue that data like novels or plays are unsuitable for speech act studies, because they conform to artistic requirements and they do not "reflect exactly the complexity of actual speech use". We agree entirely that fictional data cannot be taken as a substitute for spontaneous face-to-face conversations, but we hold that fictional data deserves to be investigated in its own right. It may give us insights into social practices in interaction in past periods better than any other kind of written data. The language use is in no way less "real" than in spontaneous conversation, but it is subject to very different constraints. The "real life" examples collected by cloze tests (i.e. gap-filling exercises) and the diary method are likely to miss more subtle overtones like irony and sarcasm; in the former they would be inappropriate and probably discarded, in the latter they may be difficult to capture. Fictional data may be better in displaying the large scale of compliments and their overtones, and narratorial commentary may be helpful for the interpretation of speaker illocutions and the perlocutionary effects of utterances.

The "artistic requirements" can be approached from another point of view, too, which is in terms of condensed or typified speech acts. We claim that the patterns detected in the Chadwyck-Healey database reflect what was going on in real life, but perhaps in a somewhat different and more focused form. The fascination of literature lies in its ability to capture essential features of life and present the chosen aspects in a way that gives them special significance. An illustrative example of what fictional materials can yield us, and how authors condense overtones of normal face-to-face interactions without losing their credibility, can be found e.g. in the following comparisons of fictitious and real-life comments. Compliments tend to occur at particular structural points in conversations, so much so that they are more or less expected at these places. Manes and Wolfson quote the following two examples in which the speakers jokingly refer to the expectation that a compliment would be in order at this point of the conversation. In example S is offering pastries to her guests at a party [11, 55].

S: Have one of these, I made them. A: (Takes a cookie)

S: Now you have to tell me it's good.

In example speaker A elicits a compliment from S and then comments on it.

A: John wouldn't let us put a black phone here because ...

(gestures to new furniture). S: I love these, by the way. They're nice. A: Thank you. I've been waiting.

Historical material offers similar examples, e.g. Oscar Wilde builds a sarcastic and ironic scene on the observation of an appropriate place for a compliment:

No; you see, to-morrow I am going to accept him. And I think it would be a good thing if I was able to tell him that I had - well, what shall I say? - Ј2000 a year left to me by a third cousin - or a second husband - or some distant relative of that kind. It would be an additional attraction, wouldn't it? You have a delightful opportunity now of paying me a compliment, Winder- mere. But you are not very clever at paying compliments. I am afraid Margaret doesn't encourage you in that excellent habit. It's a great mistake on her part.

When men give up saying what is charming, they give up thinking what is charming. But seriously.

Examples from earlier periods can also be found. The passage below reveals how easily compliments become weapons for a different kind of interaction:

Lord A. I wish, Sir, I could return the compliment; but this extraordinary conduct - Charles. No apologies my Lord, for your civil speech - you might easily have returned the compliment in the same words, and, believe me, with as much sincerity as it was offered.

Authors take their inspiration from everyday interactions, but they innovate and condense, use more varied patterns perhaps, but, to achieve verisimilitude, the topics of compliments, their formulations and the reactions to them have to follow real-life models. Our hypothesis is that the patterns of everyday, normal language use are reflected in fictional material. Genre conventions are important as they pose constraints; the utterances may be stylized and become stereotypical like the insults in saints' lives. In its imitation of everyday communication, the material in prose comedies is perhaps closest to spontaneous speech of past periods. Fictional material has its own limitations, but once its nature and its special kind of constraints are acknowledged, it gives us valuable and authentic material from past periods. Because of its vast array of interaction in various situations, it is able to reflect more varied and complex exchanges or utterances. Our claim is that corpus studies of comprehensive materials bring us closest to the ethnographic method when dealing with past periods and cultures.

compliment speech act

Conclusion