Komplimenti i odgovori na komplimente između kultura i rodova: primjer britanske i američke tv serije "The Office"

Compliments constitute an important aspect of humans' everyday communication. The skill of complimenting is highly indicative of one's pragmatic competence. Compliments perform different functions, from increasing social rapport, establishing friendly relationships, expressing admiration and affection, greeting and introducing to showing speaker's envy, disapproval, sarcasm or an intention to flatter the addressee into one own advantage. Therefore, compliments can also be perceived as positive or negative face threatening acts, depending on which aspect of the interactant’s face they might harm. A lot of research has been done in order to investigate functional, semantic, syntactic and lexical properties of compliments, as well as the choice of compliment response strategy. The listed features of compliment use practice vary with the gender and the cultural framework of the interactants. This case study examines how the use of compliments and compliment responses has been presented in British and American mockumentary sitcoms The Office and The Office: An American Workplace. The corpus was comprised of the first season of each television series and examined in order to extract compliment utterances. These were analysed in term of functional, semantic and syntactic properties, as well as the choice of compliment response strategies. Findings were compared in order to detect cultural and gender-based variations. The representation of differences in compliment use practice in the analysed sitcoms constitutes an important aspect of the protagonists’ characterisation and contributes to achieving humorous effect