Field: The corpus method
Strictly speaking, the philological method and the conversation analytical method both depend on a corpus that is searched for compliments, but under this heading I subsume approaches that use electronic corpora and computerized search techniques. In the philological method fictional material is manually searched for instances of compliments, and in the conversation analytical approach transcriptions of actual conversations are searched in this way. In the corpus method, however, search strings are developed that locate in one way or another instances of compliments. Two types of corpus searches can be distinguished. A corpus search can search for the speech act verb “compliment” itself, or it can search for syntactic patterns or lexical elements that are typical for actual compliments.