چكيده
Computer-Mediated Communication can be defined as the process of human data interaction in a network or on the World Wide Web. It has given people greater freedom to express their thoughts and convictions than face-to-face contacts, giving people a new perspective on how they connect with one another. Compliments are positive strategies to build camaraderie and to convey various intentions. The number of studies on the speech act of compliment is abundant; however, studies which compare Persian and English in this pragmatic behavior in the context of online communications such as social networking sites where compliments are commonly paid and received, are scarce. This cross-cultural study was conducted to compare the way speech act of compliment run in Persian and English languages in social networks. The primary objective of this descriptive qualitative study was to find out what strategies Persian and English language users employ to express compliments on Instagram. Moreover, it seeks to find out whether there are any statistically significant differences in the use of strategies between the two corpora. To this end, 2400 comments were selected from 12 posts, 1200 of which came from Persian posts and the other 1200 from English ones. From these 2400 comments, there were 804 compliment comments which were both verbal and nonverbal(emoji) ,408 from Persian corpus and 396 from English one. The data was randomly collected from the pages of singers, actors, actresses and comedians on Instagram. The data were then analyzed based on the Enssaif’s (2005) Taxonomy of speech act of compliment. The findings showed that Admiration strategy was by far the most frequent strategy of the compliment comments in both Persian and English corpora. Moreover, Approval, Wish, Surprise, Invocation, Comparison, Exaggeration, Questioning and Gratitude to God strategies were used more in Persian corpus, and Admiration, Metaphor, Bride, Happiness and Advice strategies were used more in English corpus. The findings may be beneficial to improving teachers' abilities to construct classes and materials that ensure students' cross-cultural understandings and allow learners to communicate effectively with speakers from other backgrounds. Language institutes can build on of this study to teach pragmatically talented students in the field of EFL.
