Komplimenterwiderungsstrategien im Bulgarischen und Deutschen

This empirical study is about a contrastive analysis of verbal compliment response strategies (CR strategies, hereafter) in Bulgarian and German. The aim of the present study was to describe the distribution and the frequency of the CR strategies used in both speech communities in order to reveal similarities and differences between Bulgarians and Germans in terms of the realization of the speech act CR. Furthermore, the choice of CR strategies was analyzed in connection with gender and speech community as well as the influence of the compliment topic, the status and the social distance between the interaction partners. In addition, this study encompassed the gender-specific compliment response behavior, both within the two speech communities as well as across them. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) functioned as the survey instrument for the data collection. A total of 160 German and 160 Bulgarian students participated in this survey. Data-interpretation has shown that both Bulgarians and Germans most frequently accepted compliments. By means of a chi-square test, a significant result was obtained in terms of the differences in the distribution of the three main strategies ACCEPTING, DEFLECTING/EVADING (including the strategy “Ignoring”) and REJECTING in both speech communities. While the Bulgarian participants opted to accept the compliments more often than the Germans; the latter rejected compliments more frequently or avoided them. “Thanking” is the most frequent CR strategy across both speech communities. However, both speech communities show a similar compliment response behavior overall. In terms of gender differences, this study has shown that women accept compliments more often than men. In comparison, men reject or evade compliments more frequently than women. Whereas men favored the strategies “Using humor” and “A(ccepting)-Explaining”, no such preference could be determined for the female participants of the study.