Compliment as a hybrid speech act in the English-language discourse

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of pragmatic and discursive characteristics of an English compliment as etiquette conditioned means of implementing the politeness principle in discourse. The paper focuses on social and psychological characteristics of the compliment as a positive politeness strategy and reveals the hybrid nature of the compliment viewed as a speech act which unites emotional- evaluative and metacommunicative functions in verbal interaction and integrates pragmatic features of expressive and phatic metacommunicative speech acts.