Self-politeness in managing rapport sensitive acts: The case of compliment responses in Turkish Şükriye Ruhi Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey The maxim and the face-management approaches (Leech 1983; Brown and Levinson 1987) to linguistic politeness have received extensive criticism and current academic debate is flourishing with studies that propose extensions of the models or alternative frameworks (e.g., Spencer-Oatey 2000; Eelen 2001). A central issue raised in discussions is the definition of politeness as a technical term. As underscored by Eelen, a promising approach to conceptualising politeness (in his terminology, Politeness 2) is to investigate people’s evaluations of (im)politeness (i.e., Politeness 1). Despite the significance of this proposal, most current research on compliment response has not addressed this issue (e.g., Yu 2003). This is unfortunate since discrepancies have emerged in interpretations of the theories, especially when the face-management approach is the locus of debate. To illustrate, returns are positive politeness strategies in Chen (1993) whereas they feature as negative politeness in Henderson (1996). As this is central to politeness theory, this speech act thus warrants further scrutiny. With these considerations in mind, this paper presents a qualitative study on naturally occurring compliment responses in Turkish for the purpose of unravelling conceptualisations of (im)politeness (i.e., Politeness 1). The study dwells on responses that are theoretically problematic and shows that interlocutors are as much concerned about their own standing in communication as they are about others in the sense that they are sensitive to self-presentational issues. These concerns critically involve the speaker’s sense of personal/social worth, his/her relation to the addressee, and perceived communicative intentions. The data reveal that these aspects of interaction are discursively contested when they conflict with the complimentee’s evaluation. Samples (1)-(3) illustrate how complimentees challenge either the assessment of self in the compliment (1 and 2) or the motivation for the compliment (sample 3). (‘Cer’ stands for ‘Complimenter’; ‘Cee’ stands for Complimentee’) (1) Cer I think these freckles give you a charming air. They make you more attractive → Cee Oh don’t speak nonsense! I don’t want an air like that. What’s more I don’t want freckles Cer OK my dear! Be calm. I just told you what I think Cee (no reaction) (2) Cer You’re very beautiful today again my lady → Cee Thank you. It’s my usual style my dear Cer Oh! We’re very modest! [we refers to the complimentee] Cee Of course I’m both beautiful and modest (3) Cer You know what I really like you a lot → Cee What do you want again? Tell me go on tell me let’s see