Data for this study was obtained from one strata of the larger population of Syria and the US. The Syrian compliment responses were uttered by middle class people from an urban area (i.e. Damascus) and most of the American compliment responses were given by Caucasian university graduate students. One cannot assume that these findings generalize to other groups within Syria or the US or to other Arabic-speaking or English-speaking countries. Further research is needed to know how generalizable these findings are. In order for students to become communicatively competent in a second language, they need both grammatical and pragmatic competence (Thomas 1983). However, achieving pragmatic competence may, at times, be complicated due to pragmatic transfer – using the rules governing speech events from one’s L1 speech com-munity when interacting with members of an L2 speech community. Pragmatic transfer can lead to pragmatic failure, to not understanding the illocutionary force of an utterance, to not understanding what is meant by what is said (Thomas 1983). Such situations can result in cross-cultural misunderstandings and communi-cation breakdowns. Cross-cultural studies such as this one contribute to our know-ledge of appropriate compliment/compliment response competence in Syrian Arabic and American English and also to our understanding of pragmatic transfer as a possible cause for pragmatic failure. The results of this study suggest similarities and differences in Syrian Arabic and American English compliment responses. Similarities include the overall manner of responding – both Syrians and Americans are much more likely to either accept or mitigate the force of the compliment than to reject it outright. In addition, members of both groups use some similar response types (e.g. Agreeing Utterances, Compliment Returns, Deflecting or Qualifying Comments, and Reas-surance or Repetition Requests). Finally, males and females in both groups employ most of the response types. An exception is Agreeing Utterances; Syrian females did not use this response. Students of English and Arabic can use these similari-ties between Arabic and English compliment responses to their advantage by learn-ing the responses that are similar in both languages. As Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993) point out, behaviors that are consistent across L1 and L2 usually result in communicative success. However, Hurley (1992) warns that the similarity of an L2 form to a form in the learner’s L1 can also be a pragmalinguistic problem. The danger is that the L2 learner may overgeneralize the form to inappropriate settings. Although the two groups share similarities in compliment responses, they also differ in important ways. In responding to compliments, US recipients are much more likely than Syrians to use Appreciation Tokens (e.g. thanks). The infrequency of this response in the Arabic data suggests that the utterance Shukran (‘thank you’) by itself is not usually a sufficient response to an Arabic compliment and needs to be supplemented by additional words. By itself, it may sound flat and awkward because it appears to signal the end of the conversation. As illustrated