Compliments are among the most widely studied speech acts in pragmatics. The present study takes a new sequential approach by investigating compliments in context, considering compliment form, as part of a Positive Remark continuum, with the respective Response Strategy uttered in response. Analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively in multi-party conversations of the Santa Barbara Corpus of American English, the sequences suggest a connection between the address and reference terms in the Positive Remarks and the strategies chosen as a response.

• Compliments and Positive Assessments
• Editorial page
• Title page
• LCC data
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Research on compliments, positive assessments, and their responses
  • 2.1 Compliment or positive assessment?
    • 2.1.1 Recognizing the form, or: Spotting a compliment when you hear one
    • 2.1.2 Positive assessments
    • 2.1.3 Compliments and assessments: Same but different?
  • 2.2 How to respond to Positive Remarks
    • 2.2.1 Pomerantz (1978, 1984) on second assessments
    • 2.2.2 Responses in research
  • 2.3 Sequencing the turns
    • 2.3.1 From single utterance to conversation
    • 2.3.2 Combining the turns in a working model
• Chapter 3. Methodology: The data base
  • 3.1 Collecting assessments, compliments, and their responses
    • 3.1.1 From field notes to corpus search
    • 3.1.2 Speech acts and sequences in corpora
  • 3.2 The data base that suits the purpose
    • 3.2.1 General information on the SBCSAE
    • 3.2.2 Choice of scenes from the SBCSAE
• Chapter 4. The coding of the Positive Remark sequences
  • 4.1 Coding Positive Remarks
    • 4.1.1 Reference in Positive Remarks
    • 4.1.2 From Manes/Wolfson’s formulae to a new grammatical descriptive approach
    • 4.1.3 Further codings in the Positive Remarks
  • 4.2 Sets of Response Strategies
    • 4.2.1 The strategies in the SBCSAE data
    • 4.2.2 Suggested preference structure in Positive Remark sequences
  • 4.3 Turn structures of PosR sequences
    • 4.3.1 Challenges of multi-party discourse
    • 4.3.2 The structure of following turns in Positive Remark sequences
  • 4.4 Additional coding of the Positive Remarks
    • 4.4.1 Features of the organizational level
    • 4.4.2 Syntactical structure and sentence type
    • 4.4.3 The topic level: What do they talk about?
• Chapter 5. General overview of Positive Remark sequences
  • 5.1 A general overview of all Positive Remarks in the data
    • 5.1.1 The distribution of the Positive Remarks
    • 5.1.2 Positive Remarks and sentence types
    • 5.1.3 Topics in Positive Remarks
  • 5.2 The Response Strategies
    • 5.2.1 The distribution of the Response Strategies
    • 5.2.2 Response Strategies and sentence type
    • 5.2.3 Topic and Response Strategies
  • 5.3 Interaction and sequencing
    • 5.3.1 Response Strategies and their use in the Positive Remark sequences
    • 5.3.2 Structure of turns following a Positive Remark
    • 5.3.3 Response Strategies used in specific turns in relation to the supercategories
  • 5.4 Summary of general findings
• Chapter 6. Positive Remark sequences: Focus on three supercategories
  • 6.1 The _adj_ category
    • 6.1.1 _adj_ subcategories
    • 6.1.2 _adj_ interaction and turn organization
    • 6.1.3 Sequences of Positive Remarks and Response Strategies in ‘turn by other’ sequences in _adj_
  • 6.2 The _noun_ category
    • 6.2.1 _noun_ subcategories
    • 6.2.2 _noun_ interaction and turn organization
    • 6.2.3 Sequences of Positive Remarks and Response Strategies in ‘turn by other’ sequences in _noun_
  • 6.3 The _verb_eval category
    • 6.3.1 _verb_eval subcategories
    • 6.3.2 _verb_eval interaction and turn organization
    • 6.3.3 Sequences of Positive Remarks and Response Strategies in ‘turn by other’ sequences in _verb_eval
  • 6.4 Summary and statistical testing of the sequences
• Chapter 7. Discussion
  • 7.1 Discussion of the Positive Remarks
    • 7.1.1 Utterance and sentence types
    • 7.1.2 Topic in Positive Remark sequences
    • 7.1.3 Form and function
    • 7.1.4 The subcategories of the Positive Remarks: A general comparison
  • 7.2 Sequences and responses
  • 7.3 Discussion of preferred Response Strategies
    • 7.3.1 Opting out
    • 7.3.2 Explaining
    • 7.3.3 Agreement
• Chapter 8. Conclusion and outlook
• References
  • Websites
• Appendix A. Abbreviations
• Appendix B. Additional tables and text description
• Appendix C. Additional figures
• Index