Self-praise on Chinese social networking sites

• Published in: Journal of pragmatics Vol. 169; pp. 179 - 189
• Main Authors: Ren, Wei, Guo, Yaping
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.11.2020; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Chinese; Chinese languages; Computer mediated communication; Linguistics; Microblogs; Modesty; Pragmatics; Qualitative research; Self-praise; Social media; Social networking sites (SNSs); Social research; Chinese; Microblogs; Self-praise; Social networking sites (SNSs); Modesty
• ISSN: 0378-2166; 1879-1387
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2020.09.009

Self-praise involves disclosing positive content about oneself, and such disclosures can be treated as self-elevating acts. This study adds to the growing literature on self-praise, especially in online contexts, by analysing pragmatic strategies in Chinese online self-praise from a dataset of 300 user-generated microblogs on Weibo. This study analyses the frequency and percentage of each self-praise strategy deployed by Chinese users, supplemented by a qualitative analysis of individual strategies with examples. It was found that three main pragmatic strategy categories are employed for self-praise in Chinese microblogs, namely explicit self-praise without modification, modified explicit self-praise, and implicit self-praise, in decreasing order of frequency. This study also generates hypotheses to discuss self-praising on microblogs and provides insights for research on self-praise. •This study examines pragmatic strategies in Chinese online self-praise.•Three pragmatic strategy categories are used for self-praises in Chinese microblogs.•This study also generates hypotheses to discuss self-praising on microblogs.