Gender differences in complimenting strategies with special reference to the compliment response patterns of Hungarian undergraduate students.

After a brief overview of the literature on complimenting strategies, we present the results of research aimed atfinding gender-based differences in compliment responsestrategies based on Hungarian undergraduate students'responses to discourse completion tasks. We found thatin native language contexts, the patterns of the use ofmacro compliment response strategies are similar to those in previous research based on native speakers ofEnglish, however, female respondents participating inour research used more Agreement macro CRs inresponse to female compliments than to male ones, while male respondents offered Agreement macro strategiesto male and female compliments with close to equal frequency. We have also foundgender-based differences in the patterns of micro CR strategies as well as differencesbetween Hungarian and EFL responses that are eitherdue to misperceptions about native English normsor the lack of positive pragmatic transfer.