COMPLIMENT RESPONSE STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK LITERARY DISCOURSE: ACCEPTANCE, REJECTION, AND MODESTY NORMS IN WILDE AND SAID AHMAD
Abstract
This article examines compliment response strategies in English and Uzbek literary discourse, analysing how competing norms of acceptance and modesty are negotiated in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Said Ahmad's Kelinlar qoʿzgʿoloni. Drawing on Pomerantz's taxonomy of compliment responses, Holmes's cross-cultural framework, and Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, the study documents eight distinct response strategies distributed across the two corpora and demonstrates that Victorian English and Soviet-era Uzbek characters resolve the modesty-acceptance dilemma through fundamentally different social logics. English characters in Wilde's comedy deploy individualist, performative strategies (praise upgrade, meta-modest deflection, scale-down counter) that transform the modesty norm into a vehicle for social superiority. Uzbek characters in Said Ahmad's comedy deploy communal, evidential, and institutionally determined strategies (collective amplification, evidential scepticism, institutionalised acceptance) that reflect collectivist social values and Islamic modesty norms of the traditional household setting. The analysis reveals that compliment response behaviour is a culturally sensitive indicator of the social values, power relations, and communicative norms of each tradition.
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