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Volume 1, Issue 1
  • ISSN 2542-3851
  • E-ISSN: 2542-386X
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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.

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2018-05-28
2024-10-15

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Self-praise online and offline
Internet Pragmatics 1, 184 (2018); https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00009.day
/content/journals/10.1075/ip.00009.day
/content/journals/10.1075/ip.00009.day
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): bragging; computer-mediated communication; self-enhancement; self-praise; self-presentation; speech acts; WhatsApp

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