Compliments on a Home Birth Helpline

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which speakers positively assess recipients—a generic practice of complimenting in talk-in-interaction—in the particular institutional context of a helpline for women seeking a home birth. It analyzes the positive assessments (n = 112) produced by a single call-taker across 80 helpline calls. It considers their design, how they are responded to, and the actions (other than or additional to complimenting) they are used to do. The findings support the literature, suggesting that complimenting is an important professional skill, and show both how it is done and its value for the helpline. They also extend our knowledge about complimenting as a social action more generally and about actions other than complimenting that positive assessments can be used to do.

[Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Research on Language and Social Interaction for the following free supplemental resource(s): sound files (16 in total) associated with Extracts 1, 2, 3, 11, 12, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, and 28.]

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the British Sociological Association Conference, Glasgow Caledonian University, April 2010. We are very grateful to the call-taker and the callers on the Home Birth helpline, who gave permission for their calls to be recorded for the purposes of research and training. This work would not have been possible without their input. We would also like to thank the call-taker for her permission to make sound files available as an accompaniment to this article. Finally, we are grateful to Sue Wilkinson for useful discussion of some of the data presented here and to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on two earlier versions of this article.

Notes

¹We are not aware of any studies of complimenting in ordinary conversation in British English (though see Speer, 2011, for a study in which people report to a third party compliments received from another).

²Analyses of German ordinary conversational data show that compliment acceptance is never done using an appreciation token (i.e., equivalent to thank you in English). Instead German speakers confirm the assessment (with ja/yes), assess the compliment as a nice thing to say (e.g., schon/that's nice), or give a second assessment of the assessable as strongly positive as the first assessment that the compliment giver has used (Golato, 2003, 2005).

³Most callers are, as far as we know, first-language British English speakers, but three identify themselves as second-language English speakers whose first languages are Irish, French, and Hungarian respectively. The native French speaker is included here in Extracts 2, 12, and 29.

⁴This article focuses on the 112 positive assessments made by the call-taker to callers. Additionally we have a much smaller collection of compliments from callers to the call-taker that will be the topic of a future publication.

⁵It is worth noting that while some personal attributes and characteristics may be universally seen as positive, others may be differentially valued across different social groups or subgroups (or individuals). One reviewer queried whether judging someone to be “vocal” was necessarily intended to be complimentary, and clearly there are groups, and contexts, in which it would not be. Based on our knowledge of the other interactions in the home birth helpline corpus, however, it is clear that characteristics such as (in other calls) “speaking out,” being “articulate,” and “standing up for yourself” are invariably positively valued and reinforced.

⁶We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for the analysis here.