Gender Variation in Negotiating Social Relationship

behaviour and social distance. This is akin to Brown and Levinson's positive face whose interpretations require that persons ' face are not anointed "just by anyone, but by some particular others especially relevant to the particular goals"(1987). The frequency of exchanges between intimates and total strangers was less than for acquaintances, especially status-equals, hence the 'bulge'. However, it appears limited cross-cultural comparisons, have been made to date. Further insight might call for both qualitative investigation into "the way the social identities of interlocutors vis-à-vis one another condition what is said"(Wolfson 1988), and quantitative profiling of the distribution of such speech acts across the population of those "who ha[ve] the right or obligation to greet, thank, compliment " (Wolfson 1988). This paper investigates interlocutors ' compliment behaviour among educated speakers of Nigerian English – a speech community for which cultural norms appear to differ significantly from those cited above, but language form differs minimally. In particular it focuses on how men's and women's behaviour pattern differently. In a corpus of 1200 compliment exchanges ethnographically collected in Lagos, Nigeria, the frequency of compliment exchanges between intimates rivals (for females) or surpasses (fo