Compliments in English Comedy Films versus Their Persian Subtitles: A Functional Comparative Study

Abstract

Compliments, and in general speech acts, have always been a subject of study both in sociolinguistics and pragmatics in order to touch cultural differences between languages. This study aims at investigating American compliment functions versus their Persian counterparts. Regarding the significance of different genres and their different effects on the compliment functions, comedy film subtitles are considered as the corpus of this study. To this end, 300 compliments were identified and analyzed in three American comedy movie subtitles. The data were coded and categorized under Leech’s (1983) six maxims, to assess the instances of differences between English and Persian compliment functions. The results revealed that 2% of compliments had a different function in Persian versus English compliments. It was also concluded that the maxim of Approbation was regarded to be the most frequent function of Persian compliments in the subtitles while, the maxims of Sympathy, Generosity, and Agreement were employed more in English. Moreover, some compliments were detected whose function was not defined in Leech’s Politeness Principle. These, however, only occurred in sarcastic situations and pertained to comedy genre.