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Article published In: Internet Pragmatics
Vol. 1:1 (2018) ► pp.184–203

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Self-praise online and offline

The hallmark speech act of social media?

 | University of Basel
Published online: 28 May 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00009.day
Abstract
In contrast to the assumptions of linguistic research on face-to-face interaction, CMC studies have shown that self-promotion is acceptable and even desired in certain online contexts. However, investigations of self-praise online repeatedly refer to the specific features of internet environment or internet communities that cause a temporary suspension of the constraint against self-praise. The constraint itself is treated as somewhat of an axiom. The assumption is, therefore, that the speech act of self-praise is face-threatening and disruptive and can only occur when certain conditions prevail, for example, when a disclaimer #humblebrag is provided. In the present study, I look at self-praise in private WhatsApp chats. Until now, self-praise has been investigated in broadcasting contexts of Twitter and Instagram. On the basis of the existing description of these naturally occurring episodes of self-praise, a retrieval strategy is developed to identify self-praise in a corpus through queries for collocations of lexical markers. An analysis of the episodes of self-praise retrieved from the WhatsApp corpus and some preliminary results from the corpus of spoken American English support the tentative hypothesis that self-praise is an unmarked speech behaviour that is a part of an everyday speech act repertoire. The existing claim about its special status could be explained through a combination of intuitive assumptions carried over from the influential studies of the pre-corpus era, and the retrieval methods that targeted the modified self-praise.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Incidence of self-praise, its acceptability and effects
    • 2.1Strategic impression management: Nobody likes a bragger
    • 2.2Self-presentation online
    • 2.3Linguistic realisation of self-praise
  • 3.Self-praise in computer-mediated communication: First analysis
    • 3.1Operational definition and search criteria
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (50)
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