EN
This paper, sociopragmatic in nature, undertakes three tasks by the help of a linguistic corpus elicited from 170 subjects with a discourse completion test. First, it defines the strategies of replying to compliments of the Hungarian linguistic community. Then, it broadens its theoretical perspective and investigates the individual strategies in the light of Leech's maxims of politeness. The conclusions the authoress draws serve as a starting point to her third objective of exploring the cultural properties of replies to compliments. In particular, she wishes to find out if the norms directing the execution of speech acts of that kind in the community of Hungarian speakers rely on the principle of mutual understanding as in Western cultures or rather on the principle of modesty as preferred in Oriental cultures.