The Social Construct of Compliments: Strategies of Meranaw College Students

Abstract

Compliment and compliment responses are positive strategies used mainly to build camaraderie and to strengthen interpersonal relationships among interlocutors. The social construct of these speech acts offers meaningful insights into the socio-cultural and religious background of a particular speech community. The present study investigates the compliment behavior of Meranaw people by analyzing the strategies employed by 70 Meranaw college students and identifying the differences between the manner of speech of Meranaw men and women based on their compliment speech acts. Meranaw or the “people of the lake” is an ethnolinguistic group living predominantly on the southern part of the Philippines and known to be adherents of Islam. The data were obtained using written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaires that contained a total of 10 hypothetical scenarios adapted from the study of Berowa (2020). The results showed that both groups of participants strongly preferred using explicit and explanation strategies in giving compliments. This study discovered four additional semantic formulas evident in the compliments of the participants: cultural and cultural references, using humor, conversation openers, and address terms. In returning a compliment, the results showed that male participants likely used agreeing utterances and offering utterances while the female participants tended to use appreciation tokens, shift credit, informative comments, return compliments, and downgrading utterances. Additionally, this paper highlights the discovery of two additional strategies in providing compliment response across genders: rhetorical questions and offering utterances. Thus, this study argues that the existence of language dichotomy across genders is largely affected by numerous sociocultural and religious factors present in one speech community.