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Article In:
The Speech Act(ion) of Commenting in Social Media and Beyond
Edited by Robert Külpmann and Rita Finkbeiner
[Pragmatics & Cognition 31:2] 2024
► pp. 339–366

Specified compliments in comments to politicians’ Facebook posts

Champion, loser, or both?

ORCID logo | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
ORCID logo | Bar-Ilan University
This article discusses “specified compliments” consisting of a positive evaluation of an ability or achievement; a preposition; and an area of expertise or excellence, e.g. “experts in security”. An analysis of 74 examples in comments on politicians’ Facebook posts during 2020–2021 revealed that specified compliments convey a predominantly ironic meaning in order to criticize the complimentee. Three different categories of ironic specified compliments are identified: (1) compliments where the area of expertise is positive and are interpreted as ironical based on their linguistic and extralinguistic context; (2) compliments where the area of expertise is negative and are thus understood as insincere; and (3) compliments in which the area of expertise is apparently positive but less than other areas, and therefore they are paradoxically interpreted as both sincere compliments in a specific area and a condemnation in general.
Keywords: complimenting, irony, condemnation, readers’ comments, Facebook
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The speech act of complimenting
  • 3.Specified compliments: The pattern and its meaning
  • 4.Compliments in readers’ comments on politicians’ Facebook pages
  • 5.Corpus and methodology
  • 6.Specified compliments: Pragmatic meanings and functions
    • 6.1General data
    • 6.2Sincere specified compliment
    • 6.3Ironic specified compliment: Type 1
    • 6.4Ironic specified compliment: Type 2
    • 6.5Ironic specified compliment: Type 3
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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