1. Compliments

A compliment is a polite speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone for something which is valued positively by the speaker and the hearer (Holmes 1986; Ye 1995). Research shows that for English speaking Americans, the major function of compliments is to establish and maintain social “rapport” between participants or a “reinforcement and/or creation of solidarity” between speaker and addressee (Manes and W…