Effects of gender and generation on Chinese self-praise on social media

Yaping Guo, Wanrong Chen and Wei Ren
Beihang University

Self-praise is an often-examined topic in pragmatics studies, but it has rarely been investigated from the point of view of variational pragmatics. Therefore, this study investigates the impact of gender and generation on Chinese self-praise on social media. A total of 400 self-praise posts were collected from Weibo, the Chinese version of X (formerly Twitter), from eighty participants (forty females and forty males). The analysis found that females praised their own appearance and possessions significantly more frequently than males, while males paid much more attention to competence than females. There were significant differences between the older and younger groups in terms of their use of the modified explicit self-praise strategy and the implicit self-praise strategy. In addition, there were significant differences between the two groups in relation to the topics of appearance, possessions, competence and virtue. The underlying social factors behind these similarities and differences are discussed.

Publication history

Date received: 23 February 2024

Date accepted: 14 January 2025

Published online: 8 August 2025

Table of contents

Variational pragmatics (VP henceforth) is a subdiscipline of intercultural pragmatics that mainly probes into the impact of various macro-social factors, such as region, ethnicity, gender, age, social class etc., and their interplay in relation to language use in interactions (Barron and Schneider 2009). In addition, VP research also investigates the interaction between macro-social and micro-social factors, with the latter including power, distance and other situational factors, and its impact on pragmatic conventions in a variety of languages. To date, previous studies on VP have explored the impact of region (e.g., Schneider 2005), age (e.g., Roels and Enghels 2020) and gender (e.g., Rees-Miller 2011) on face-to-face interaction, with a limited amount of attention to VP studies on social media communication (e.g., Liu, Li and Ren 2021; Placencia and Powell 2020). In addition, many studies within the domain of VP have focused on speech acts such as requests (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer 2009; Liu, Li and Ren 2021), compliments (e.g., Rees-Miller 2011; Ren, Lin and Woodfield 2013), disagreements (e.g., Wang et al. 2022) and refusals (Ren 2015). However, to date only scant research attention has been given to self-praise.

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