New perspectives on the analysis of compliment variability from production to perception

This special issue adopts a multifaceted approach to analyzing compliments from various perspectives. The introductory paper by Maíz-Arevalo (2026) organizes previous studies on compliments into three waves, providing a significant overview of the literature on compliments. The papers by Meluzzi and Castagneto (2026), Xie (2026) and Jia (2026) are focused on the under-researched area of the perception of compliments. From a cross cultural perspective, Ravetto (2026) examines the lexical and syntactic patterns of explicit and implicit German and Italian compliments, identifying six different patterns of implicit compliment, two of which are culturally specific to Italian. Two papers address the sociolinguistic factor of gender in compliments: Alfonzetti and Scivoletto (2025) approach this topic from both production and perception perspectives, while Sorianello and Gurrado (2025) demonstrate that women’s compliments are emphatic at the lexical level, whereas men’s compliments are characterized by marked prosody. As ever, the pragmatics of this complex speech act is grounded at the interfaces of different forms, functions and linguistic levels.