Compliments in English and Persian interaction:

sociolinguistics. To date, many models of politeness have been put forward in the literature. In this study, Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) politeness model was used to carry out a comparative analysis. The compliment response behavior of native Persian speakers was compared with that of native speakers of American English to see if it can provide evidence for applicability of Brown and Levin-son’s universal model. The data were taken from a corpus of 50 hours of record-ing the live interviews from the Persian and English TV channels. The results show Persian and English speakers use different strategies and culture has an im-portant effect on speakers ’ speech act performance. The results also demonstrate the inapplicability of Brown and Levinson’s model for cross-cultural compari-sons