A Comparative Study of Compliment Responses Among Italian and Mexican Spanish Speakers

Abstract

This paper explores compliment response (CR) strategies in Italian and Mexican Spanish from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective. The research is based on a corpus consisting of 2400 compliment responses elicited through 12 written Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) which were administered to 200 participants in the form of open-ended questions. The data were categorised according to Castagneto and Ravetto’s (2015) taxonomy. The main aim of this study is to identify differences and similarities between the two cultural groups which have never been compared before, and to examine how gender can influence recipients’ responses. The results suggest cross-cultural similarities in Italian and Mexican CRs. The strategies used by both groups align with broader norms of positive politeness, confirming the view of compliments as face-enhancing acts. However, although Direct Acceptance is preferred in both languages, Mexicans tend to use opaque Acceptance strategies more frequently than Italians, with gender also playing a role. This behaviour is particularly evident among Mexican male participants, who often respond to compliments more evasively, using irony, proverbs, ritual formulas, or by deflecting the topic. Other differences include the average length of CRs in words. The data reveal that Mexicans tend to give longer responses than Italians, regardless of strategy or gender.