Explicit personal compliments
Explicit personal compliments are the prototypical compliments that say something positive about the addressee. Compliment research is almost exclusively restricted to this type. Extracts (1) to (4) exemplify typical examples. These are British English examples from the British National Corpus, but in fact, they correspond closely to the patterns identified by Manes and Wolfson (1981) as typical for American English compliments (Patterns – Field – Diary).
| (1) | Your hair always looks really nice anyway. (BNC KPS 728) |
| (2) | "You look wonderful," said John, "glowing with health. Shall I pour you a cup of tea? It's just made." (BNC A0R 2262-4) |
| (3) | He sat up, breathing in deeply. "What's that? It smells delicious." She smiled and turned away, returning moments later with a bowl and chopsticks. He took it from her, sniffed at it, then tucked in, holding the bowl close to his mouth, smacking his lips in appreciation. "This is excellent. What is it?" (BNC G04 1566-71) |
| (4) | After she had finished signing, I approached her, clutching a drink. "That was great," I said. "And I love your dress." (BNC AEO 1923-4) |
These examples were retrieved from the British National Corpus by searching for stereotypical phrases, such as “looks really nice”, “you look wonderful”, “smells delicious” and “I love your”. Such corpus queries, of course, yield many unwanted hits. But a manual search of these hits easily provided some relevant examples. A more systematic way of retrieving compliments from corpus data is described in Field – Corpus: Typical Strings.
For other types of compliments see: