Giving and accepting compliments – the example of Croatian and German students

This paper aims to determine the similarities and differences in the formation of compliments and compliment responses by Croatian and German students. The research was carried out by means of the Discourse Completion Test questionnaire among 30 students at the University of Zadar and 30 students at the University of Heidelberg. The way of giving compliments was analyzed at the lexical, morphological, and syntactic level. Furthermore, to determine to what extent the context influences the giving and receiving of compliments, the following contextual variables were analyzed: the subject of the compliment (appearance, ability, assets, personality), the formality of the situation (formal/informal situation), social status, role and closeness of interlocutors (strangers, acquaintances, friends, best friends). Regarding the response to compliments, the similarities and differences in closeness and the way of expressing compliments and their linguistic form were analyzed. Similarities refer to the ways of expressing compliments in both languages with elliptical and exclamatory sentences. Differences refer to forms of giving compliments. The most common responses to compliments were acceptance and gratitude.