Complimenting behaviour has received much academic attention across diverse fields of study, such as the domain of speech act theory (e.g., Jacob et al. 1993, as cited in Mustapha 2012), politeness theory (e.g., Holmes 1986), and conversation analysis (e.g., Pomerantz 1978). Recently, the scope of research on complimenting behaviour has broadened and compliments have become subject to research on flirtatious interactions. However, at heart of studies on flirtatious interactions is typically the ambiguous and deniable nature of flirting (Speer 2017: 4). Only few works on flirting systematically examine the role of compliments as interactional methods and practices of flirtatious behaviour in context (e.g., Speer 2017). This is also partly due to the difficulty of obtaining empirical data as flirting characteristically occurs in intimate and spontaneous situations (Mortensen 2017: 582). Furthermore, research on complimenting behaviour in English-speaking cultures and communities has shown that the speech act of compliment exhibits a strong formulaic nature in terms of syntactical and lexical structures. Adjectives, in particular, are of central relevance with regard to their high frequency distribution (cf. Wolfson 1981; Holmes 1986). The PhD project endeavours to advance the systematic investigation of complimenting behaviour in the domain of flirting. Drawing on reality television dating shows as the source for the corpus, the project focuses on differences and similarities in the linguistic realisation of flirtatious compliments and compliment responses in relation to the interactants’ gender and sexual identity. More specifically, the analysis attempts to shed light on correlations between the role and function of adjectives and the sociolinguistic / sociocultural variable of gender, mixed gender and same gender.

Mortensen, Kristine K. 2017. “Flirting in Online Dating: Giving Empirical Grounds to Flirtatious Implicitness.” Discourse Studies, 19/5. 581 – 597.

Speer, Susan A. 2017. “Flirting: A Designedly Ambiguous Action?”. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50/2. 128 – 150. (Accepted Author Manuscript, DOI: 10.1080/08351813.2017.1301297).