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Applied Linguistics 1992 13(1):51-71; doi:10.1093/applin/13.1.51
© 1992 by Oxford University Press
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Articles

Compliments and Politeness in Peer-review Texts

DONNA M. JOHNSON

University of Arizona

This paper reports on an empirical analysis of the forms, strategies, and functions of complimenting in one genre of written discourse. The data base is a set of 51 peer-review texts written in an academic setting. First, analyses are provided of the syntactic and lexical patterns of 256 compliments. These analyses reveal the degree and nature of formulaicity in the compliments. A related discussion of politeness considerations in the use of syntactic framing strategies is also offered. Next, several complimenting discourse strategies used by writers to construct their texts are identified. It was found, for example, that writers exhibited a remarkable regularity in the use of opening compliments. It is argued that writers use complimenting discourse strategies to establish and maintain rapport and to mitigate both global and specific face-threatening acts and that these social purposes help to account for both their frequency and patterning in the texts.


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