Explicit and implicit compliments and compliment responses in German and Italian social networks

Compliment is a widely studied speech act, as the large number of investigations dealing with this topic shows. However, existing research has focused almost exclusively on explicit compliments, probably because they are more frequent than the implicit ones. Explicit compliments openly express a positive evaluation often through formulaic structures (Manes and Wolfson, 1981; Alfonzetti, 2009), while implicit compliments are those where hearers «need to infer the corresponding implicature for their interpretation» (Maíz-Ar� evalo, 2012:983). The present investigation aims to examine and compare the use of these two types of compliments in a corpus of virtual exchanges in German and Italian social networks. The study focuses on explicit and implicit compliments, from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view, with a particular attention to the linguistic patterns used to express them in each language; then, referring to Castagneto and Ravetto's (2005) taxonomy it investigates the reactions of compliments' addressees, highlighting how these speech acts are perceived by German and Italian networkers. The analysis shows the use of a very narrow range of formulation strategies in both languages. Concerning the distribution of compliment response types, German and Italian online interactants manifest great similarities in the selection of the different compliment answers, preferring to accept the given appreciations rather than to reject or ignore them. Moreover, the corpus analysis reveals in both languages the tendency to accept implicit compliments more frequently and easily than the explicit ones.