"Wow to Thank You" A study on Compliment Responses in a Metropolitan City

Abstract

This study investigated compliment responses among Karachi inhabitants. It is a qualitative research under observational design. The aim of the research was to find out; how people in Karachi maintain solidarity while responding to compliments. It shows a new beam towards studying compliment response in a multicultural or metropolitan city. On the other hand, it revealed behavior change in language used between what they reported and how they naturally behave in cross cultural communication. The data was collected through discourse completion task (DCT), with four situational setting (possession, appearance, ability, nature) under ten contextualized tasks. A total of 76 DCT were collected, including 760 responses. For triangulating information, observation was used as secondary data collection tool. The data were analyzed by the framework presented by Herbert's (1998) model. The result concluded that people in Karachi has a distinct behavior at responding to the compliments unlike of what has been followed in other part of Pakistan.