The use of the ethnographic method in the study of a speech act

The answers to compliments in Lebanese dialect and peninsular Spanish

Abstract

The present study is a comparative research on compliment responses in peninsular Spanish and Lebanese dialect. The topics of compliments are physical appearance, belongings and skills. The study was conducted with members of a Lebanese and a Spanish social network which were either residents in the same neighbourhood or were related by kinship or friendship. The independent variables are origin, age and gender. In both social networks, parallel communicative situations were created. The participants were linked by kinship or friendship and paid a compliment on the same topic. Secret recordings were used in order to register these communicative interactions and create a corpus formed by natural conversations. The corpus comprised 138 compliment response sequences and were analysed following a taxonomy created by the researcher for the specific study of the Spanish and Lebanese corpora.