Do females pay more compliments than males? A sociolinguistic study of compliment usage in Malta

Abstract

Politeness is an important characteristic in every day conversations. We all strive to be polite so as to depict a good image of ourselves and to be liked by others. According to Brown and Levinson (1987) persons can either be positively or negatively polite. This study analyses aspects of positive politeness through the use of compliments paid by the Maltese in different settings. The data for this study was obtained through an ethnographic approach in which a corpus of naturally occurring compliments paid to individuals in different contexts was collected.