Muy a tus órdenes: compliment responses among Mexican-American bilinguals

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Abstract
Recent work in the analysis of conversational discourse has included the study of compliment responses among English-speaking American monolinguals (Pomerantz 1978). This preliminary work suggests that compliment responses are subject to separate constraint systems that involve the receiver's obligation to respond to a compliment while at the same time avoiding self-praise.This paper examines compliment responses, within the framework provided by Pomerantz, in conversational interactions between bilingual Mexican-American speakers. The strategies used by these speakers are compared with those used by monolingual English-speaking Americans and with those used by monolingual Spanish-speaking Latin Americans.