Holmes (1988) defined a compliment as a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some 'good' which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer (p. 446), and the importance of compliments as speech acts worthy of study has been well documented in research (Barnlund & Araki, 1985; Holmes, 1988; Knapp, Ho