What is it about?
Despite a huge body of literature on compliment and compliment response speech acts indiverse linguacultures (see Section2), there is still an unmet need in research investigatinghow compliments are produced and interpreted in talk-in-interaction. In this context, thepresent study seeks to add to this research lacuna by probing the complimenting behav-iour (compliments and compliment responses) as it occurs on-the-go in colloquial AlgerianArabic (CAA). Based on the postulations put forth in conversation analysis, audiotapednaturally occurring face-to-face conversations were transcribed and analysed. Thefollowing features have been selected for discussion: complimenting relative to topicprogressivity, complimenting in compliment-trigger situations, complimenting as aresponse to self-deprecation, and the co-occurrence of compliments and divine in-vocations. The targeted features enabled us to raise some issues that have been under-explored (or sometimes unexplored) in compliment research: on-command compli-ments, discursive creativity, complimenting as a multi-turn speech event, recycled com-pliments, and employing self-deprecation and the compliment it triggers as interactionalresources. It is hoped that the present study, on a lesser represented variety of Arabic, willcontribute to our understanding of complimenting in talk-in-interaction.©2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.1. IntroductionAs defined byHolmes (1988, p. 210),1a compliment is“a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit tosomeone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some‘good’(possession, characteristic, skill, etc.) which ispositively valued by the speaker and the hearer.”It is common to accent the face-enhancing side of compliments in defi-nitions like the above one. Nonetheless, compliments have also a face-threatening side as they can be manipulative (Brownand Levinson, 1987, p. 66) and put the receiver in a“double bind”(Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2001, p. 142), in that he/she has toagree with the complimenter and concomitantly avoid self-praise (Pomerantz, 1978), in order to ensure the conformity toboth the modesty and agreement maxims (Leech, 1983).Despite the fact that compliments (Cs) and compliment responses (CRs) have been studied in abundance in so manylinguacultures, including the different varieties of colloquial Arabic (see Section2.2below), complimenting remains an under-researched area in CAA. Therefore, this study aims to address this lacuna. In addition, most studies on complimenting andE-mail address:b.dendenne@ens-setif.dz.1It should be noted that not all researchers agree on the need to start from a working definition for Cs. For further details on the issue of (the need to)defining Cs prior to investigating them, one can consultMustapha (2003, Ch. 3, pp. 24e44).Contents lists available atScienceDirectJournal of Pragmaticsjournal homepage:www.elsevier.com/locate/pragmahttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.11.0130378-2166/©2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Journal of Pragmatics 172 (2021) 270e287