Chapter published 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. 189–212

Chapter 8
The interpersonal effects of complimenting others and self-praise in online health settings

| University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland
| University of Basel

This article investigates the pragmatic functions of complimenting and self-praise in two UK social media forums about smoking cessation, and responses to these speech acts. We compare these insights with other related e-health contexts (advice column, anti-smoking websites). Adopting an interpersonal pragmatics perspective, we focus on how these speech acts are employed for relationship creation. Our findings suggest that complimenting and self-praise are pivotal discourse practices in the forums. The status of the posting quitter – as new, or as successfully quitting – appears to affect the topic of compliments, the functions of third-party compliments and the order in which it is acceptable for initial posters to use self-praise; additional interpersonal effects relate to the overarching purpose of improving one’s lifestyle. In comparison to the peer-to-peer forum context, we find the number of compliments drastically reduced in the professional e-health contexts, which may be attributed to the set-up of practices. This paper adds to previous studies by exploring complimenting and self-praise in (e-health) social media.

Keywords: interpersonal pragmatics, compliments, self-praise, forum, e-health
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1The forum data
      • 4.1.1The topic and function of compliments and self-praise
      • 4.1.2Responses to self-praise and compliments
      • 4.1.3The linguistic form of the compliments
    • 4.2Other e-health practices in our corpus
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.313.08rud
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