Compliment responses on Facebook Status used by foreigners: Gender Perspective

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on analyzing compliment responses used by the foreigner on facebook status. The compliment response is an utterance used to respond another utterance that refers to something which is positively valued by participants and attributed to addressee. (Herbert, 1990).

The aim of this research is to know the difference between male and female in giving compliment responses on facebook status. This research will give the comprehension of compliment responses and the way how it is used in giving compliment responses.

Compliment responses have twelve types, they are: A) Accept Type : appreciation token, agreeing utterance, downgrading utterance and return compliment, B) Reject Type : disagreeing utterance, question accuracy, and challenge sincerity, and C) Deflect/Evade Type: shift credit, informative comment, ignore, legitimate evasion and request reassure. This research used qualitative design as it’s method of analyzing and collecting the data. The data are utterances that are used by four foreigners-2 males (facebook account; Jamie crabbe and jory rosemeier) and 2 females (facebook account; jenna Leigh Schmidt and Sarah Trebil cock)on this facebook status.

The data are analyzed firstly by finding two males and two females who write status facebook and give compliment responses are from overseas. Then, the researcher divided into four parts; compliment responses used by male for male’s compliment, compliment responses used by male for female’s compliment, compliment responses used by female for male’s compliment, and compliment responses used by female for female’s compliment. Then, explaining and describing the utterances based on the types of compliment responses based on Holmes, such as; compliment responses used by male for male’s compliment has four types from twelve types of compliment responses, they are: Disagreeing utterance (DiU), Informative comment (IC), Ignore (Ig) and Shift credit (SC). Then, compliment response used by male for female’s compliment has two types from twelve types of compliment responses, they are: Disagreeing utterance (DiU), and Informative comment (IC). Meanwhile, compliment responses used by female for male’s compliment also has seven types from twelve types of compliment responses, they are: Appreciation Token (AT), Disagreeing Utterance (DiU), Return Compliment (RC), Ignore (Ig), Informative comment (IC), Shift Credit (SC) and Request Reassure (RR).The last, compliment responses used by female for female’s compliment has six types from twelve types of compliment responses, they are:Appreciation Token (AT),Agreeing Utterance (AU), Downgrading utterance (DoU), Disagreeing Utterance (DU), Return Compliment (RC), and Informative Comment (IC). In addition, the researcher finds all types of compliment responses except Challenge Sincerity (CS), Question Accuracy (QA) and Legitimate Evasion (LE)in a certain of parts that are used by four foreigner on facebook. Based on those findings, the researcher found that females tended to give accepting of compliment responses either for male’s or female’s compliment. Meanwhile, males more tended to give rejecting of compliment responses than females.

For the English Language and Letters Department students, this research may give benefit especially on the application of sociolinguistics study. At last, the researcher suggests for further researcher can investigate in doing other research that deals with compliment responses behavior and relationship between sex-differences and on other social network such as twitter.