Comparing compliments in Face-to-Face vs. online interactions among Iranian speakers of Persian

There has been ongoing research contrasting online vs. Face-To-Face (FTF) interactions for more than a decade. This study fills the gap in the literature considering FTF vs. online contexts by comparing the norms and patterns of complimenting in Persian and explores the complimenting strategies, syntactic patterns, and internal and external modifiers used in each setting. The corpus included 366 FTF compliments related to the topic of appearance. Findings demonstrated that in both settings explicit and formulaic compliments are used more frequently than implicit and non-formulaic ones. However, implicit compliments in FTF interactions were less prevalent than those in online settings. FTF compliments did not show the same level of creativity as the online ones did and a more diverse set of adjectives were used in online vs FTF compliments. Finally, the paper provides implications for further research.