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So far I was not able to transfer the linguistics theory into real life, but then it finally happened: It all started with a conversation between friends - and suddenly it was there, a compliment that was followed by a short, but recognizable, silence.

Speaker A: "It's great to have such wonderful people around me."
Speaker B: *short silence* "Thanks, the same counts for you."

This excerpt of a talk underlies two principles, namely it is "the preference for agreement and the avoidance of self-praise" [253]. The recipient of this compliment gets in an unpleasant situation, and now has to find a way out of this problem. In this example, speaker B accepts the statement of speaker A, but tweaks the answer into a compliment for speaker A. Or as Duranti states it for his similar examples: "[...] speaker B shifts the praise without disagreeing with the positive assessment made by A" [254].

This might be quite a silly example, but it is self-explanatory. For the sake of empiricism you might also challenge one of your friends with a compliment and check whether you'll discover the same.


References

Duranti, Alessandro. 1982. Linguistic Anthropology. CUP. Chap. 8: "Conversational exchanges", 245-264.