COMPLIMENT RESPONSES AMONG INDONESIAN MALE AND FEMALE PUBLIC FIGURES ON TWITTER

The research deals with compliment responses of Indonesian male and female public figures in Twitter. The objectives of the research were to identify the type and pattern realization of compliment responses used by male and female public figures and to find out the reasons underlying these types occurred in that way. To achieve the objective, the research was conducted by applying descriptive qualitative design. Tweets containing compliment responses were collected from Twitter’s account of 25 males and 25 female Indonesian public figures. Each of them has two tweets to analyze. The tweets were transcribed, analyzed and categorized based of Herbert Taxonomy. It was found that female public figures used appreciation token with 22 exclamations. Under the strategy of agreement, women still slightly seemed to agree to the compliments more than men. The new pattern was found which can be considered as the combination of strategies. Women tend to deliver a complete form of thanking. On the other hand, men employed more abbreviated form of thanking which might appear too brief. Most female public figure expressed their appreciation token in more intimate way and linguistically stronger for they used the words dear, love or darling more than the male public figures. Both male and female public figures were also found to employ simple or one move response such thanking and commenting. However, female public figures were still found to use more complex or two to three moves’responses.