I am an M.A student in TEFL and I am trying to come up with a good proposal for my thesis. I was thinking on working on speech acts and more specifically I wanted to focus on compliments and how one's culture and gender might contribute to variety in making compliments. I went as far as making a DCT questionnaire and distributing it among male Iranian university students to see whether I can observe intersting male-specific patterns and got some interesting results.

However, there has been extensive research on both semantic and grammatical patterns of compliments and compliment responses not only in different cultures and languages but also in Persian/Farsi. One of my professors even told me of how useless such research would be and even if I were to conduct such research, what would be the significance?

I am on a strict deadline here and really need some insights. Should I change my topic and move on or do you know of any new ideas in compliment speech act research or any other speech act for that matter? 

Thanks a lot,

Ida

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