Face(s) and Facework(s) in a Corpus of German and Italian Compliments

The paper proposes a crosslinguistic analysis of complimenting interactions in two different languages and cultures. The main aim is to show how face and relationships are co-constituted when a compliment is elicited. To do so, we focused on German compliments collected in Baden-Württemberg (Mannheim, Heidelberg, Stuttgart) and on Italian data elicited in Cancello ed Arnone (province of Caserta, southern Italy). The study is based on our multilingual corpus of compliments (Co.Cor Compliment Corpus) containing 2108 compliments in Italian, 728 in German as well as complimenting sequences in other languages, such as Russian (more than 200 utterances) and Albanian (about 100 compliments). The comparison of the selected data has shown dif-ferences and similarities in the management of compliments in both languages, particularly in relation to the way in which the speech action is negotiated among the interactants working as a social group, and to the performance of compliments, where the face of each participant is co-constructed and ap-proved by the other speakers.