"The present volume focuses on complimenting behavior, including the awarding of (self-)praise, as manifested on social media. These commonplace activities have been found to fulfil a wide range of functions in face-to-face interaction, discoursal and relational amongst others. However, even though the giving of compliments and praise have become a pervasive practice in online environments, it remains a largely underexplored field of study within pragmatics. Self-praise is an activity that appears at the present time to be rapidly gaining ground online, and the various functions it performs clearly also need further investigation. The different contributions to this ground-breaking volume - 12 in total - aim to address this gap in research by exploring and shedding light on a number of aspects of these phenomena in a range of languages and language varieties. New socio-digital contexts are examined, supported in some cases by social networking sites not previously studied in complimenting behavior research. These include Facebook, Instagram, Renren, Twitter, as well as web forums, message boards and live text commentary"--.

• Complimenting Behavior and (Self-)Praise across Social Media
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
  • 1. Focus, scope of this volume, and its rationale
  • 2. Compliments and (self-)praise
  • 3. Prospects for the future
  • 4. Organization of the volume and contents of the individual chapters
  • References
• Part I. Complimenting behavior among friends and family
  • Chapter 1. A comparative study of compliment responses among Chinese Renren users and American Facebook users
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Literature review
      • 2.1 Social networking sites and culture
      • 2.2 Compliments and compliment responses
      • 2.3 Compliment responses in Chinese
      • 2.4 Online complimenting behavior
    • 3. Methodology
      • 3.1 Participants and data
      • 3.2 Coding scheme and analysis
    • 4. Results and discussion
      • 4.1 Comparing Chinese and American English online compliment responses on Renren and Facebook
      • 4.2 Comparing Chinese face-to-face and online compliment responses
    • 5. Concluding remarks
    • References
  • Chapter 2. “Gracias pana”: A glimpse into Ecuadorian male compliment responses on Facebook
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Literature review
      • 2.1 Face-to-face compliment response studies
      • 2.2 Male compliment response studies in face-to-face Spanish-speaking contexts
      • 2.3 Compliment response studies in an online context
      • 2.4 Social media-specific forms of compliment response
    • 3. Methodology
    • 4. Results
      • 4.1 Ecuadorian male compliment responses in context
      • 4.2 The effect of compliment topic on compliment response rates
      • 4.3 Compliment response taxonomy
      • 4.4 External modifiers
    • 5. Discussion
      • 5.1 Ecuadorian male compliment responses in context
      • 5.2 ‘Like’ and its multiple functions
      • 5.3 Compliment upgrades
      • 5.4 Internal and external modifiers
    • 6. Conclusions
    • References
  • Chapter 3. “Pero… ¿y las caritas esas cómo se ponen?”: Age effects on Facebook compliments in Peninsular Spanish
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Literature review
      • 2.1 Online compliments
      • 2.2 Language use and age
      • 2.3 Linguistic patterns of compliments
      • 2.4 Linguistic features according to age
    • 3. Methodology
      • 3.1 Participants
      • 3.2 Data gathering procedure and corpus description
      • 3.3 Ethical issues
    • 4. Findings
      • 4.1 Linguistic patterns and age
      • 4.2 Typographic variation and emoji
      • 4.3 Lexical choices
      • 4.4 Prolixity
    • 5. Conclusions
    • References
  • Chapter 4. “Tu masssss ❤ te amo”: Responding to compliments on Instagram among Ecuadorian teenage girls
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Background
      • 2.1 Previous studies on compliment responses in different languages
      • 2.2 Compliment response studies in Spanish
      • 2.3 Compliment responses on social media
    • 3. Methodology
    • 4. Results
      • 4.1 Main strategies
      • 4.2 Modification strategies
    • 5. Conclusions
    • References
  • Chapter 5. Compliment response behavior among Japanese-English bilinguals on Facebook
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Previous studies
      • 2.1 Seminal works on face-to-face compliment responses
      • 2.2 Previous studies of compliments and CRs in Japanese contexts
      • 2.3 Compliment responses in online settings
    • 3. Data and method
      • 3.1 Participants
      • 3.2 Data collection
      • 3.3 Corpus and analytical approach employed
      • 3.4 Participation roles
      • 3.5 Taxonomy of CRs
    • 4. Results
      • 4.1 Activity profiles and frequency of compliment responses (CRs)
      • 4.2 Acknowledged and unacknowledged CRs
      • 4.3 Style and frequency of response amongst participants
      • 4.4 Patterns of acceptance, rejection, and evasion
    • 5. Summary and conclusions
    • References
• Part II. Complimenting behavior and praise in the political domain
  • Chapter 6. Complimenting behavior in Spanish political discourse on Twitter
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Theoretical framework and background
      • 2.1 Compliments in face-to-face interaction
      • 2.2 Complimenting behavior in social media
      • 2.3 Politics, social media and Twitter
    • 3. Methodology and data analysis
    • 4. Results and discussion
      • 4.1 Compliment topics
      • 4.2 Linguistic structures
      • 4.3 Functions and face implications
    • 5. Concluding remarks
    • References
  • Chapter 7. #Lovely country, #wonderful people: Diplomatic compliments and praise on Twitter
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. The language of sociability in international relations
    • 3. Everyday and public compliments and praise
    • 4. The communicative challenge of complimenting in social media
    • 5. Data and method
    • 6. Doing sociability in IR via compliments and other amicable actions
    • 7. Tweeting diplomatic compliments: Content, form and functions
    • 8. Conclusion
    • References
• Part III. Complimenting behavior and self-praise in health, sports and fitness domains
  • Chapter 8. The interpersonal effects of complimenting others and self-praise in online health settings
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Literature review
    • 3. Data and methodology
    • 4. Analysis
      • 4.1 The forum data
      • 4.2 Other e-health practices in our corpus
    • 5. Discussion and conclusions
    • Acknowledgements
    • Funding
    • References
  • Chapter 9. Healthy lifestyle, dieting, fitness and bodybuilding: Compliments in the context of Polish online discussion forums and message boards
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Social media and online forums
    • 3. Studying complimenting behavior
    • 4. Corpus and data collection methodology
    • 5. Data analysis
      • 5.1 Direct compliments
      • 5.2 Indirect compliments
      • 5.3 Implicit compliments
      • 5.4 Other compliments
      • 5.5 Intensifying adjectives and adverbs
      • 5.6 Internal and external modification
      • 5.7 Topics
      • 5.8 Functions
      • 5.9 Summary
    • 6. Discussion
    • 7. Conclusions
    • References
  • Chapter 10. “I want your brain”: Complimenting behavior in online Over by Over cricket commentary
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Sports discourse pre-web 2.0
    • 3. Over by Over cricket commentary
      • 3.1 The social credentials of OBO
      • 3.2 OBO as virtual congregation
      • 3.3 Social relations in OBO
    • 4. Relevant literature
    • 5. Data selection and coding issues
      • 5.1 Data selection issues
      • 5.2 Data coding issues
    • 6. Complimenting behavior in OBOs: Results
      • 6.1 Compliment givers and receivers
      • 6.2 Compliment types
      • 6.3 Topics of compliments
      • 6.4 The function of compliments in OBO
    • 7. Concluding remarks
    • References
  • Chapter 11. Compliments in congratulatory tweets to Spanish Olympic athletes
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Background
      • 2.1 Congratulations
      • 2.2 Compliments
      • 2.3 Twitter and congratulations
    • 3. Methodology and corpus of analysis
    • 4. Analysis
      • 4.1 Formulae employed in congratulatory tweets
      • 4.2 Direct and indirect compliments
    • 5. Conclusions
    • References
• Part IV. Perception of self-praise
  • Chapter 12. Modified self-praise in social media: Humblebragging, self-presentation, and perceptions of (in)sincerity
    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. An overview of humblebrag from a pragmatics perspective
    • 3. Humblebragging as self-presentation work
      • 3.1 Dual goals of self-presentation
      • 3.2 “Bragging” indicates competence
      • 3.3 “Being humble” engenders liking
      • 3.4 A potential solution to balance self-praise and humility
    • 4. Effects of humblebragging on impression formation
    • 5. Humblebrags in social media
      • 5.1 The role of technology in constructing and perceiving humblebrags
      • 5.2 Compliments and humblebrags on social media
      • 5.3 A study on humblebrags and social judgments
    • 6. Conclusion
    • References
    • Appendix
• Name index
• Subject index