Abstract

The study deals with the phenomenon of Compliments in Iraqi Arabic (henceforth IA). It is based on the analysis of compliments collected through social participation and personal observation of everyday interaction in our speech community. The paper is mainly based on the sociolinguistic analysis of one hundred forms of questionnaire given to Translation students at Mosul University. The linguistic part includes the lexical, semantic and syntactic considerations of compliments. The sociolinguistic part deals with the influence of some sociolinguistic variables on complimenting (i.e., “topic”, “setting” and “participants” including their age, sex, education, urban vs. rural, solidarity vs. power, and intimacy vs. formality). The study also includes: (i) a comparison between compliments and other speech acts (ii) the functions of compliments in IA. (iii) developing sociopragmatic competence of foreign learners of IA, and (iv) cross-cultural differences of compliments. The findings are expected to reveal that compliments in IA are formulaic in nature. This implies the semantic and syntactic regularity. The study sums up with significant conclusions and recommendations.