Cover not available
Part of
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. 99–120

Chapter 4
“Tu masssss ❤ te amo”

Responding to compliments on Instagram among Ecuadorian teenage girls

| Birkbeck, University of London
| Birkbeck, University of London
Complimenting behavior within a group of Ecuadorian teenage girls on Instagram was examined by Placencia (2019). Using the same corpus, in the present study we consider the responses to compliments offered. These responses, while short, are remarkably complex, containing both text and images (emojis) and indeed textual stand-ins for paralinguistic cues such as laughter. Responses were grouped according to Holmes’s (1986) taxonomy and the data shows a distinct preference for accepting compliments given (97.7%), with fewer sub-strategies used compared to other studies. These results are considered in the context of the type of photos examined and the overall function that Instagram appears to fulfil for the group of teenagers in this study. Beyond what might be termed the basic strategies of accepting or rejecting compliments, we also look at the rich and varied sub-strategies used by the girls in this Instagram community, which they employ to express solidarity and show modesty when accepting compliments.
Keywords: compliment responses, Instagram, Ecuadorian Spanish, emojis, teenage talk, social media
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Previous studies on compliment responses in different languages
    • 2.2Compliment response studies in Spanish
    • 2.3Compliment responses on social media
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Main strategies
    • 4.2Modification strategies
      • 4.2.1Emojis and other technology-mediated phenomena
      • 4.2.2Self-praise versus modesty
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.313.04pla
References (49)
References
Achugar, Mariana. 2001. “ Piropos as Metaphors for Gender Roles in Spanish-Speaking Cultures.” Pragmatics 11: 127–137. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2002. “ Piropos: cambios en la valoración del grado de cortesía de una práctica discursiva.” In Actos de habla y cortesía en español, ed. by María Elena Placencia, and Diana Bravo, 175–192. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Androutsopoulos, Jannis K. 2000. “Non-Standard Spellings in Media Texts: The Case of German Fanzines.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4: 514–533. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bergman, Shawn M., Matthew E. Fearrington, Shaun W. Davenport, and Jacqueline Z. Bergman. 2011. “Millennials, Narcissism, and Social Networking: What Narcissists Do on Social Networking Sites and Why.” Personality and Individual Differences 50: 706–711. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boori, Ali. 1994. “Semantic and Syntactic Patterning of Persian Compliments and Compliment Responses: A Sociolinguistic Study with Pedagogical Implications.” Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Isfahan, Iran.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987 [1978]. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Rong. 1993. “Responding to Compliments. A Contrastive Study of Politeness Strategies between American English and Chinese Speakers.” Journal of Pragmatics 20: 49–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2010. “Compliment and Compliment Response Research: A Cross-Cultural Survey.” In Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures, ed. by Anna Trosborg, 79–101. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Chen, Rong, and Dafu Yang. 2010. “Responding to Compliments in Chinese: Has It Changed?” Journal of Pragmatics 42: 1951–1963. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cirillo, Valeria. 2012. “The Pragmatics of Virtual Environments. Compliment Responses in Second Life.” Lingue e Linguaggi 7: 37–58.Google Scholar
Daikuhara, Midori. 1986. “A Study of Compliments from a Cross-Cultural Perspective: Japanese Vs. American English.” Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 2: 103–134.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: 244–277. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eslami, Zohreh R., and Xinyuan Yang. 2018. “Chinese-English Bilinguals’ Online Compliment Response Patterns in American (Facebook) and Chinese (Renren) Social Networking Sites.” Discourse, Context & Media 26: 13–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Farquhar, Lee. 2012. “Performing and Interpreting Identity through Facebook Imagery.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19: 446–471. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernández-Corbacho, Anali. 2011. “Las respuestas a cumplidos como fenómeno lingüístico. Análisis contrastivo español (L1) e inglés (L2).” Romanica Olomucensia XV 87: 57–65.Google Scholar
Flores Salgado, Elizabeth. 2015. “Respuestas a cumplidos en el español de Puebla.” In La (des)cortesía en el discurso. Perspectivas interdisciplinarias (imagen, actos de habla y atenuación), ed. by María Eugenia Flores Treviño, and José María Infante Bonfiglio, 235–266. Monterrey/Stockholm: UANL-EDICE.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Herbert, Robert K. 1989. “The Ethnography of English Compliments and Compliment Responses: A Contrastive Sketch.” In Contrastive Pragmatics, ed. by Wieslaw Oleksy, 3–35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Hickey, Leo. 2005. “Politeness in Spain: Thanks but No Thanks.” In Politeness in Europe, ed. by Leo Hickey, and Miranda Stewart, 317–330. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet. 1986. “Compliments and Compliment Responses in New Zealand English.” Anthropological Linguistics 28: 485–508.Google Scholar
. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Indah, Rohmani Nur, and Nur Fatikh Rifana. 2018. “The Pattern of Compliments in Instagram Photo Comments.” International Journal of Research 7: 57–69.Google Scholar
Lázaro Ruiz, Hugo, and Ana Ramajo Cuesta. 2015. “Compliment Responses in Peninsular Spanish. Exploratory and Contrastive Study Conducted on Women from Madrid, Valencia, Catalonia, Andalusia and Castile-Leon.” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 212: 93–98.Google Scholar
Lee, Eunji, Jung-Ah Lee, Jang Ho Moon, and Yongjun Sung. 2015. “Pictures Speak Louder Than Words: Motivations for Using Instagram.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 18: 552–556. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. Longman: New York.Google Scholar
Lopera Medina, Sergio Alonso. 2015. “Estrategias de respuestas de los cumplidos.” Tonos Digital: Revista de Estudios Filológicos, 29. Available at: [URL] [Accessed 20.10.2018].
. 2017. “El análisis del forzamiento de los cumplidos.” Forma y Función 30: 77–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria. 2001. “Compliment Responses among British and Spanish University Students: A Contrastive Study.” Journal of Pragmatics 33: 107–127. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mack, Sara, and Julie M. Sykes. 2009. “¡Qué feíto estás tú también, cariño!: A Comparison of the Response to the Use of ‘Positive’ Irony for Complimenting in Peninsular and Mexican Spanish.” Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 2: 305–346. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen. 2012. “At a Loss for Words or How to Respond to Compliments: A Contrastive Analysis of Compliment Responses in English and Spanish.” In New Perspectives on (Im)politeness and Interpersonal Communication, ed. by Lucía Fernández Amaya, María de la O. Hernández, Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Manuel Mejías Borrero, and Mariana Relinque Barranca, 157–173. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
. 2013. “’Just Click “Like”’: Computer-Mediated Responses to Spanish Compliments.” Journal of Pragmatics 51: 47–67. DOI logoGoogle 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
Márquez Reiter, Rosina, and María Elena Placencia. 2005. Spanish Pragmatics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mir, Monserrat, and Josep Maria Cots. 2017. “Beyond Saying Thanks: Compliment Responses in American English and Peninsular Spanish.” Languages in Contrast 17: 128–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Placencia, María Elena. 2008. “(Non)Compliance with Directives among Family and Friends: Responding to Social Pressure and Individual Wants.” Intercultural Pragmatics 5: 315–344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. “ Qué perfección: Complimenting Behaviour among Ecuadorian Teenage Girls on Instagram.” In From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness. Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives, ed. by Eva Ogiermann, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 93–116, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017. “Compliments and Compliment Responses.” In Pragmatics of Social Media, ed. by Christian R. Hoffmann, and Wolfram Bublitz, 633–660. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Placencia, María Elena, Amanda Lower, and Hebe Powell. 2016. “Complimenting Behaviour on Facebook: Responding to Compliments in American English.” Pragmatics and Society 7: 339–365. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pomerantz, Anita. 1978. “Compliment Responses: Notes on the Co-Operation of Multiple Constraints.” In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, ed. by Jim Schenkein, 79–112. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ramajo Cuesta, Ana. 2011. “La utilización del método etnográfico en el estudio de un acto de habla: las respuestas a cumplidos en dialecto libanés y en español peninsular.” Revista Nebrija de Lingüística Aplicada a la Enseñanza de las Lenguas, 10. Available at: [URL], 10. [Accessed: 25.05.2019].
Sifianou, Maria. 2001. “‘Oh! How Appropriate!’ Compliments and Politeness.” In Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish, ed. by Arın Bayraktaroğlu, and Maria Sifianou, 391–430. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siti Yuhaida, Anniqah Mohd Yusof, and Bee Hoon Tan. 2014. “Compliments and Compliment Responses on Twitter among Male and Female Celebrities.” Pertanika Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 22: 75–96.Google Scholar
Statista. 2019a. “Most Popular Social Networks Worldwide as of April 2019, Ranked by Number of Active Users (in Millions).” Statista.com. Available at: [URL] [Accessed 12.06.2019].
. 2019b. “Distribution of Instagram Users Worldwide as of April 2019, by Age Group.” Statista.com. Available at: [URL] [Accessed: 06.06.2019].
Tang, Chen-Hsin, and Grace Qiao Zhang. 2009. “A Contrastive Study of Compliment Responses among Australian English and Mandarin Chinese Speakers.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 325–345. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Valdés, Guadalupe, and Cecilia Pino. 1981. “‘Muy a tus órdenes’: Compliment Responses among Mexican-American Bilinguals.” Language in Society 10: 53–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yáñez, Rosa H. 1990. “The Complimenting Speech Act among Chicano Women.” In Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic Issues, ed. by John J. Bergen, 79–85. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Ye, Lei. 1995. “Complimenting in Mandarin Chinese.” In Pragmatics of Chinese as Native and Target Language, ed. by Gabriele Kasper, 207–230. Manoa: Honolulu Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Centre, University of Hawaii.Google Scholar