Cover not available

In:Complimenting Behavior and (Self-)Praise across Social Media: New contexts and new insights
Edited by María Elena Placencia and Zohreh R. Eslami
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 313] 2020
► pp. 73–98

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload Book EPUB
authorization required

Chapter 3
“Pero… y las caritas esas, ¿cómo se ponen?”

Age effects on Facebook compliments in Peninsular Spanish

 | Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Published online: 17 December 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.313.03mai
Abstract
Using a netnographic approach, the present study aims to find out whether age plays a role in the realization of the speech act of complimenting as performed by a Facebook community of Peninsular Spanish users. To that purpose, a corpus of a hundred compliments was collected. Fifty of these compliments were performed by users in the age range of 18–25 and the other fifty by users in the age range of 60–75. To control for the gender variable, only compliments produced by female users were gathered. Results show that age plays a role in the way compliments are produced, especially with regards to the use of non-verbal elements (e.g., emoji). Verbal realization strategies also show interesting differences in relation to age.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Online compliments
    • 2.2Language use and age
    • 2.3Linguistic patterns of compliments
      • i.Exclamative pronoun + (semantically positive) adjective / noun phrase + (copulative verb)
      • ii.Declarative sentence
    • 2.4Linguistic features according to age
      • i.Typographic variation and use of emoji
      • ii.Lexical choices
      • iii.Prolixity
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Data gathering procedure and corpus description
    • 3.3Ethical issues
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Linguistic patterns and age
    • 4.2Typographic variation and emoji
    • 4.3Lexical choices
    • 4.4Prolixity
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (50)
References
Androutsopoulos, Janis, and Alexandra Georgakopoulou. Eds. 2003. Discourse Constructions of Youth Identities. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Argamon, Shlomo, Moshe Koppel, James W. Pennebaker, and Jonathan Schler. 2007. “Mining the Blogosphere: Age, Gender and the Varieties of Self-expression.” First Monday 12 (9). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barbieri, Federica. 2008. “Patterns of Age-based Linguistic Variation in American English.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 12 (1): 58–88. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boyle, Ronald. 2000. “’You’ve Worked with Elizabeth Taylor!’: Phatic Functions and Implicit Compliments. Applied Linguistics 21 (1): 26–46. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chen, Rong. 2010. “Compliment and Compliment Response Research: A Cross-cultural Survey.” In Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures, ed. by Anna Trosborg, 79–101. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coulmas, Florian. 2013. Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers’ Choices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Das, Anupam. 2010. Linguistic Politeness and Interpersonal Ties among Bengalis on the Social Network Site Orkut: The Bulge Theory Revisited. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Indiana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eslami, Zohreh R., Nasser Jabbari, and Li-Jen Kuo. 2015. “Compliment Response Behaviour on Facebook: A Study with Iranian Facebook Users.” International Review of Pragmatics 7 (2): 244–277. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
García-Gómez, Antonio. 2010. “Disembodiment and Cyberspace: Gendered Discourses in Female Teenagers’ Personal Information Disclosure.” Discourse & Society 21 (2): 135–160. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goswami, Sumit, Sudeshna Sarkar, and Mayur Rustagi. 2009. “Stylometric Analysis of Bloggers’ Age and Gender.” In Third International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media: 214–217.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grant-Davie, Keith. 1995. “Functional Redundancy and Ellipsis as Strategies in Reading and Writing.” Journal of Advanced Composition 15 (3): 455–469.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1986. “Compliments and Compliment Responses in New Zealand English.” Anthropological Linguistics 28 (4): 485–508.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1992. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Holmes, Janet, and Dorothy F. Brown. 1987. “Teachers and Students Learning about Compliments.” Tesol Quarterly 21 (3): 523–546. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kanayama, Tomoko. 2003. “Ethnographic Research on the Experience of Japanese Elderly People Online.” New Media & Society 5 (2): 267–288. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kozinets, Robert V. 2015 [2010]. Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online. London: Sage.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Krohn, Franklin B. 2004. “A Generational Approach to Using Emoticons as Nonverbal Communication.” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 34 (4): 321–328. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leonetti Jungl, Manuel. 1994. “Ser y estar: estado de la cuestión.” Pliegos de la Insula Barataria: Revista de Creación Literaria y de Filología 1: 182–205.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, and Cristina Izura. 2017. “Cause Ur Special”: Understanding Trust and Complimenting Behavior in Online Grooming Discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 112: 68–82. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen. 2012. “Was That a Compliment?” Implicit Compliments in English and Spanish.” Journal of Pragmatics 44 (8): 980–996. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “Just click ‘Like”’: Computer-mediated responses to Spanish compliments. Journal of Pragmatics 51: 47-67. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. “A Pragmatic and Multimodal Analysis of Emoticons and Gender in Social Networks.” In New Insights into Gendered Discursive Practices: Language, Gender and Identity Construction, ed. by Antonia Sánchez Macarro, and Ana Belén Cabrejas Peñuelas, 175–197. Valencia: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Valencia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. Jocular mockery in computer-mediated communication: A contrastive study of a Spanish and English Facebook community. Journal of Politeness Research 11(2): 289-327. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen, and Antonio García-Gómez. 2013. “‘You Look Terrific!’ Social Evaluation and Relationships in Online Compliments.” Discourse Studies 15 (6): 735–760. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Manes, Joan, and Nessa Wolfson. 1981. “The Compliment Formula.” In Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Prepatterned Speech, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 115–132. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Manes, Joan. 1983. “Compliments: A Mirror of Cultural Values.” In Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition, ed. by Nessa Wolfson, and Elliot Judd, 96–102. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Merchant, Guy. 2001. “Teenagers in Cyberspace: An Investigation of Language Use and Language Change in Internet Chatrooms.” Journal of Research in Reading 24 (3): 293–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Møller, Janus, and Pia Quist. 2003. “Research on Youth and Language in Denmark.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 159: 45–55.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nguyen, Dong, Rilana Gravel, Dolf Trieschnigg, and Theo Meder. 2013. “‘How Old Do You Think I Am?’: A Study of Language and Age in Twitter”. In Proceedings of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. AAAI Publications, 439–448.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nishimura, Yukiko. 2016. “A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Emoji Usage in Japanese Blogs: Variation by Age, Gender, and Topic.” AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research 5. Available at: [URL] [Accessed: 10.05.2018].
Peersman, Claudia, Walter Daelemans, and Leona Van Vaerenbergh. 2011. “Predicting Age and Gender in Online Social Networks.” In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Search and Mining User-generated Contents, 37–44. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pennebaker, James W., and Lori D. Stone. 2003. “Words of Wisdom: Language Use over the Life Span.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2): 291–301. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Placencia, María Elena. 2011. “ ¡Estás full linda! El impacto del nivel socioeconómico en la realización de cumplidos entre mujeres en Quito.” In Cortesía y Publicidad, ed. by Santiago Alcoba, and Dolors Poch, 115–136. Barcelona: Ariel.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2019. “ Qué perfección: Complimenting Behaviour among Ecuadorian Teenage Girls on Instagram.” In From Speech Acts to Lay Concepts of Politeness. A Multilingual and Multicultural Perspective, ed. by Eva Ogiermann, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 93–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Placencia, María Elena, and Amanda Lower. 2013. “‘Your Kids Are Stinking Cute’. Complimenting Behavior on Facebook among Family and Friends.” Intercultural Pragmatics 10: 617–646. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. “Compliments and Compliment Responses.” In Pragmatics of Social Media, ed. by Christian R. Hoffmann, and Wolfram Bublitz, 633–660. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Placencia, María Elena, Amanda Lower, and Hebe Powell. 2016. “Complimenting Behaviour on Facebook: The Case of Compliment Responses in American English.” Pragmatics and Society 7: 339–365. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Richardson, Margaret, C. Kay Weaver, and Theodore E. Zorn. 2005. “‘Getting on’: Older New Zealanders’ Perceptions of Computing.” New Media & Society 7 (2): 219–245. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosenthal, Sara, and Kathleen McKeown. 2011. “Age Prediction in Blogs: A Study of Style, Content, and Online Behavior in Pre-and Post-social Media Generations.” In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies 1: 763–772.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schler, Jonathan, Moshe Koppel, Shlomo Argamon, and Pennebaker, James W. 2006. Effects of Age and Gender on Blogging. In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposia on Computational Approaches to Analyzing Weblogs, 199–205. [URL]
Schwartz, H. Andrew, Johannes C. Eichstaedt, Margaret L. Kern, Lukasz Dziurzynski, Stephanie M. Ramones, Megha Agrawal, and Achal Shah. 2013. “Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-vocabulary Approach.” PloS one 8(9): 737–791. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Aaron. 2014. “Older Adults and Technology Use. Pew Research Center Internet & American Life Project. Available at: [URL] [Accessed: 13.05.2018].
Stenström, Anna-Brita, and Annette Myre Jørgensen. 2009. Eds. Youngspeak in a Multilingual Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali. 2005. “So Who? Like How? Just What?: Discourse Markers in the Conversations of Young Canadians.” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (11): 1896–1915. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thompson, Geoff. 2004. Introducing Functional Grammar. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wolfson, Nessa. 1981. “Compliments in Cross-cultural Perspective.” TESOL Quarterly 15 (2): 117–124. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wolfson, Nessa, and Joan Manes. 1980. “The Compliment as a Social Strategy.” Papers in Linguistics 13: 391–410. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Xie, Bo. 2008. “Multimodal Computer-Mediated Communication and Social Support among Older Chinese Internet Users.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (3): 728–750. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Guo, Jingye & Yan Jiang
2025. Linguistic (In)Directness in Complaints on an Online Discussion Forum for Chinese University Students. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 35:3 ► pp. 1388 ff. DOI logo
Guo, Yaping, Wanrong Chen & Wei Ren
2025. Effects of gender and generation on Chinese self-praise on social media. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) DOI logo
Tang, Mengyuan
2025. Local grammar and speech act analysis: a case study of compliments. Folia Linguistica DOI logo
Tian, Yuhan & Donghong Liu
2025. Relevance theory perspective of emojis used by Chinese younger and older adults in WeChat. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12:1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue