Major compliment topics can be classified into 3 categories:
- appearance/possessions
Compliments on someone’s appearance or possessions are the most
common type of compliments in American English. "Your blouse looks
beautiful!" is an example of an adjectival compliment.
About 2/3 of adjectival compliments use the words nice, good,
pretty, great, or beautiful (Manes
& Wolfson, 1981). Good is often used for performance
and nice is mostly used for appearance/attire (Knapp
et al., 1984 [©]).
"I really love your car!" is an example of a compliment
that contains a semantically positive verb. Like or love
are used 90% of the time in this type of compliment. Some other
semantically positive verbs that are used would be admire and
be impressed (Wolfson,
1989).
- performance/skills/abilities
"You did a good job!" and "You are such a wonderful writer"
are examples of compliments on performance/skills/abilities.
Concise compliments such as "Nice shot!" are typically given
by male speakers (Herbert,
1990 [©]).
- personality traits
Such comments as "Good boy" and "You’re so sweet"
are compliments on the addressee’s personality traits. This category
of compliments occurs less frequently than those on appearance/possessions
and performance/skills/abilities (Holmes,
1988 [©]).