Compliments on your Competence: A comparative study on compliment responses from Norwegian English foreign language learners and native speakers of English with a focus on pragmatic competence and idiomatic expressions

Abstract

The aim of this study has been to paint a picture of how Norwegian learners of English as a foreign language respond to compliments when communicating in English, in comparison to a group of native American English speakers. The study is founded in the belief that Norwegians come off as more rude than other Western cultures and often fail to strengthen bonds of solidarity, which is the main function of a compliment. The thesis sets out to investigate whether or not Norwegian learners would comform to the pragmatic conventions of the culture in the target language, or if there are differences founded in pragmatic transfer. The study is motivated by a wish to get a better understanding of Norwegian learners speech act performance in English, but also to form a solid background for developing teaching materials in this domain. To answer my research question I have used a discourse completion task (DCT) to gather the information needed. The test is modeled after the refined version of a DCT made by Billmyer and Varghese (2000). This method was chosen for its prominent use in speech act research, and the many benefits it provides for a study of this kind, which requires a collection of large amounts of close-to natural speech data. The data has been elicited gathered from a group of 26 Norwegian learners of English from Mailand VGS. The data has then been compared to a group of five native American Speakers from the greater New York City area. Due to the small size of this control, the Norwegian learner results have also been compared to Herbert s (1995) findings on compliment response behaviour amongst American English speakers. The study finally compares the idiomaticity of the speech act realizations between the learners and the control based on Sinclair s (1991) idiom principle. The results from this study show that Norwegian learners tend to use acceptance and nonacceptance strategies with a seemingly similar frequency to the Am.E control group. However, the coice of other strategies in addition to acceptance differed between the two groups, which indicates pragmatic transfer from the informants L1. Daily interaction with native speakers of English is shown to have had a clear effect on the strategies chosen, making them more similar to the control.