Compliment Responses of Male and Female at Senior High School in Medan

The aims of this study are to examines the types of compliments responses, the realizations of compliment responses and to analyse the CR’s realize by male and female students at senior high school in Medan. The research used qualitative research as a research methodology. The study focused on 11th grade students Inglanfor class of 15 males and 15 females students at SMA Negeri 1 Percut Sei Tuan. The study collected data using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The research findings indicate that the Agreement strategy is the most prevalent type for both genders, occurring in 87.2% of male responses (157 instances) and 86.1% of female responses (155 instances). This high frequency suggests a shared cultural prioritization of maintaining "positive face" and social harmony. The Non-Agreement strategy ranked second, accounting for 9.5% of male and 11.1% of female responses, while Other Interpretation was the least utilized (3.3% for males and 2.8% for females). Regarding pragmatic realizations, "Comment Acceptance" emerged as the most frequent strategy with 65 occurrences (36.1%), indicating a preference for elaborate responses over simple brevity. Notably, "No Acknowledgement" was entirely absent from the data, reinforcing the social obligation for verbal reciprocity among the participants.This research contributes to the field of pragmatics, specifically in the area of speech acts and gendered language style, providing insights into the sociolinguistic norms and cultural considerations influencing communication among Indonesian students.