Abstract

This study was conducted to examine the speech act of compliment among Jordanians residing in Malaysia. It aims to explore the forms of compliments, and the differences in using compliments in different gender group among Jordanians. The corpus of the current research consists of 132 compliments collected from eight participants through an ethnographic method during the holy month Ramadan and Eid al Fitri. The data were analyzed in terms of the strategies, topics and syntax of the compliments. The findings of this study revealed that the forms of compliments differ by gender. The most frequent compliments occurred in interactions within the same gender than between opposite genders. Females paid more compliments than males. While almost half of the compliments were given between females and almost one third of the compliments between males, only few compliments were given between the opposite genders. Women gave compliments the most on appearance whereas men paid more compliments on personality, possession and children. The present study shows that traditional Islamic values play an important role in complimenting behavior among Jordanians.