Compliments and compliment responses in Saudi Arabic in text-based computer-mediated communication

Access to thesis permanently restricted.The analysis of compliments and compliment responses in different languages has attracted a lot of attention by a number of scholars. Most of these studies have focused on English in particular and other Indo-European languages, for example, American English (Manes and Wolfson, 1981), New Zealand English (Holmes, 1986), and Mexican-Spanish (Nelson & Hall, 1997). Less attention has been paid to compliments and compliment responses in Arabic, but Nelson, Bakary and Batal (1993) on Egyptian Arabic, Farghal and AL-Khatib (2001) on Jordanian Arabic, Abdul Satter and Lah (2008) on Iraqi Arabic, Alamro (2013) on Saudi Arabic and Al-Gamal & Ali (2017) on Yemeni Arabic all discuss complimenting and responses in face-to-face interaction. However, no study, to my knowledge, examines complimenting and responses in Saudi Arabic in text based computer-mediated communication (CMC). In this study, I examined compliments in Saudi Arabic collected from Twitter natural text-based computer-mediated interaction among Saudi Arabic native speakers. I analyzed 150 compliments and 150 compliment responses between Saudi native speakers. The results show that compliments in Saudi Arabic speaker’s tweet are mostly explicit and tend to display certain set of syntactic patterns. The use of the adjective, nouns and verbs was also found to be restricted to a limited set of terms. Six different response strategies were employed in the tweets including no-acknowledgment, appreciation-token, return, tweet-like strategy, emoticon and benediction.Department of EnglishThesis (M.A.