Compliment Expressions and Compliment Responses Used by Characters in “Little Women” Novel

This study aimed to identify the topics of compliment, describe the functions of compliment and classify the responses of compliment used by the characters in “Little Women” novel. The method used descriptive qualitative to analyze the data. This research used Wolfson’s theory (1983) to analyze the topics and functions of compliment, and used Herbert’s theory (1989) to classify the compliment responses. Based on the data analysis, the results of this research showed that there are 48 data containing compliments and 33 data containing responses of compliment. There are 4 the topics of compliment used by characters in “Little Women” novel, 10 data on personal appearance (21%), 7 data on possession of appearance (15%), and 16 data general ability (33%), and 15 data on specific act ability (31%). There are 6 functions of compliments used by characters in “Little Women” novel to express admiration or approval with the data is 15 data (31%); to reinforce desired behavior with 9 of 48 data; the functions of compliment to soften replace gratitude and congratulations with 8 data of 48 data (17%); to maintain solidarity with 7 data (15%); to open and sustain conversation with 5 data (10%); whereas the lowest frequency is to soften face threatening acts in critique and request with the frequency 4 data (8%). There are 7 responses of compliment such as, No Acknowledgement; Appreciation Token; Praise Downgrade; Comment Acceptance; Disagreement; Return; and Reassignment.\ud Keywords : topics of compliment, functions of compliment, compliment response