“say mashallah:” an investigation of the role of age, social distance, compliment topic, and a (dis-)belief in evil eye on iranian women’s compliment response behavior

While the significance of pragmatic competence has been an incentive for the increase in pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic studies, the emergence of cultural linguistics has revived an unprecedented interest in scrutinizing the complex socio-cultural system of under-researched languages and cultures and their peculiar cultural scripts and schemas. reporting one phase of a more comprehensive investigation of farsi and english compliment response behavior of iranian respondents, the present study follows up on our previous proposition (author, in preparation) that some cultural schemas like a (dis-)belief in evil eye can complicate the interlocutors’ interpretations of and (non-)verbal responses to compliments (as predominantly face-saving acts versus potentially face-threatening acts). controlling for gender, we collected the data through semi-structured interviews and oral dcts from 46 female native speakers from 3 different age groups with a focus on social distance, compliment topic (compliments about the internal characteristics/traits or external features/possessions/individuals), and the participants’ stated belief (or disbelief) in evil-eye. the data were analyzed based on herbert’s 12-category taxonomy (1990) and its modified version by author (in preparation). our analysis revealed the limitations of herbert`s cr taxonomy for iranian females’ responses, while substantiating the adequacy of the modified version by author (in preparation) proposed for the iranian context. compliment topic was found to be quite decisive in the adopted compliment response, so evil eye cr type (which signifies a strong belief in evil-eye) was professed to be used more freely in responses to compliments on family members or beloved ones. but it was less prevalent in responses to compliments on the complimentees or their personal belongings as it could be interpreted as an fta. the practical and theoretical implications of the findings of similar studies for cross-cultural interactions, language learning and teaching, and pragmatics instruction and scholarship will be discussed at the end of the presentation.