This paper deals with compliments and other forms of assessments in French and Lebanese invitations to dinner between friends and relatives. While a wide range of literature has been devoted to compliments since Pomerantz's paper in 1978, with different methodologies, in different settings and in different languages , Arabic is understudied in this respect, as well as on other aspects of interaction . The study is based on naturally occurring interactions analysed in a conversation analytic/interactional linguistics approach. The first part of the paper presents the main aspects of previous studies on compliments that will be used as reference points for the present study, before coming to the corpora and the methodology for comparison. The last part of the paper is devoted to the interactional multimodal comparative analysis of the two corpora. This analysis has brought to the forefront some shared practices in the use and management of different forms of comments and assessments in the French and Lebanese corpora, as well as very strong differences related to what is being assessed and to compliment responses. We have found two common formats and two formats that are specific to one or the other of the two corpora. In the paper, we successively present the common formats (i.e., displaying and assessing an element related to the meal, assessing while savouring a dish), then what seems specific to the French corpus (noticings and comments), then to the Lebanese corpus (compliments on the person). Finally, we try to relate these findings to other and more general features, which have been recurrently observed in French or Lebanese interactional behaviour.
