Self-Praise Sequences In Social Networking Sites:A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Perspective

Self-praise is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to the speaker for some "good"(possession,accomplishment,skill,etc.)that is positively valued by the speaker and the potential responder.Much of the literature based on classic politeness theories so far has considered self-praise as a static discourse,overlooking its dynamic nature of generating self-praise sequence between the speaker and the responder.Meanwhile,though self-praise has been studied across different cultures,previous research mainly focuses on face-to-face conversation but neglect other ways of communication.However,self-praise quickly emerges as a crucial element of the speech act repertoire in social networking sites within a particular language community,which usually triggers interaction among social networking users.The current study thus delves into the online interactional patterns of self-praise sequences from a cross-cultural pragmatic perspective.The study selects ten active Facebook users and ten active WeChat Moments users and examines their posts and responses throughout the year of 2015.Also,comparisons are drawn between the self-praise sequences in the Chinese community and those in the English community.Results from the qualitative and quantitative data analyses demonstrate that 1)there is no difference of the self-praise types and the self-praise response types between the English and Chinese online communities under study;2)there are both similarities and differences concerning the frequencies of self-praise and self-praise responses between the two language communities:on the one hand,the strategy that social network users in the English and Chinese communities tend to use the most is explicit self-praise without modification,and social network users in the English community have a tendency to use more implicit self-praising strategies,while the Chinese speakers perform more explicit strategies;on the other hand,when facing the self-praise,the responders from both language communities tend to make more implicit responses than explicit responses,especially the implicit strategy of clicking "like;" and that 3)the self-praise lead to different systems of self-praise sequences in the two language communities.The findings promise both theoretical and practical implications for online interaction.Theoretically speaking,the current study treats self-praising behavior as an ongoing and dynamic speech act and places more emphasis on the speaker's perspective in analyzing politeness.The study also adds new reference to the related literature and expands the research arena from studying self-praise from one single language community to a cross-cultural pragmatic perspective,which sheds some light on the issue of universality versus culture-specificity in politeness studies.By using social networking interaction as data,the study adds new literature of online speech to politeness studies.All this helps to introduce a new angle for the research on online speech acts.From the practical point of view,the different systems of self-praise sequences help confirm that misunderstanding of the use of self-praise sequences between two language groups may trigger communication breakdowns.It also boasts pedagogical importance on language learning,helping learners of American English or Chinese to respond to self-praise in a culturally acceptable manner.