This research aims at exploring the pragmatic strategies of responding to compliments in a speech sample of 654 compliment/response sequences elicited by means of DCT. The corpus has a specific diatopic connotation, since all respondents come from Apulia. For the analysis, the pragmatic categorization proposed for Italian language by Castagneto and Ravetto in 2015 has been adopted. Within the sample, both mitigation and reinforcement strategies coexist, although they are not equally distributed among the informants. The results reveal the presence of cross-gender and cross-ages differences. In details, males tend to use more Limited Acceptance than female ones, while younger women show a strong preference for Direct Acceptance, especially by Thanking and Reassurance Request. Differently, older female informants present a greater degree of Limited Acceptance and a wider use of avoidance strategies, such as Deflection or Discredit.
