Abstract

Scholars’ interest in the speech act of complimenting has grown over the years for many reasons one of which is its being robust with sociolinguistic information. However, it appears that many studies still grapple with what the compliment is because of its nature which has been described to be naturally ubiquitous and many times overlapping with other speech functions. In addition, fieldwork experiences have also called for the need to define the compliment although some scholars have argued that there is no need to define the act. In this paper, we glean from fieldwork experiences and data analysis in a study of 1200 compliments in Nigerian English to support the claim that a definition is needful and to propose some defining characteristics (termed approaches) that might be useful for those researching on the compliment data.

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