A Pragmatic Study of Implicit Compliments in Jordanian Arabic

This paper is a pragmatic study of the speech act of implicit complimenting among Jordanian people. The researcher follows the ethnomethodological approach in order to identify the construction and organization of such a speech act. Such an approach renders the speech act of implicit compliment as an undivided, integral part of the discourse in which it occurs. Adopting this orientation enables the researcher to focus on the motives behind choosing an implicit compliment instead of an explicit one at a specific time of the discourse. The results of the study show that implicit compliments are different from explicit ones and that such a speech act belongs to a different category. The study also shows that implicit compliments convey many interactional functions that serve the speaker and the addressee and that some functions serve them both.