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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. 263–286

Chapter 11
Compliments in congratulatory tweets to Spanish Olympic athletes

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid
| Sapienza Università di Roma

In this chapter we examine the form and function of compliments in congratulatory tweets sent to Spanish athletes during the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. The study is based on a corpus of 500 tweets taken from the profiles of 14 Spanish athletes (5–21 August 2016). Compliments play an important role in congratulatory remarks as they serve to either realize congratulations or to support them. Findings show that congratulatory acts supported by compliments or stand-alone compliments acting as congratulatory acts exceed tweets of congratulatory remarks alone. The use of direct compliments is found more frequently within the corpus than indirect ones, with elliptical and vocative constructions being the most prominent. It is suggested that this may be a consequence of the tendency to conciseness of Twitter and other social networks.

Keywords: congratulations, compliments, Twitter, social media, Peninsular Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Congratulations
    • 2.2Compliments
    • 2.3Twitter and congratulations
  • 3.Methodology and corpus of analysis
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Formulae employed in congratulatory tweets
    • 4.2Direct and indirect compliments
      • 4.2.1Syntactic structures of direct compliments
      • 4.2.2Syntactic structures of indirect compliments
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.313.11her
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