Self-Praise in Russian: A Wild Goose Chase

Responses to self-praise on Chinese social media

“…As a negative response disagrees with bloggers on their self-praise and thus directly threatens their positive face (Brown and Levinson, 1987), it is not surprising that it was the least popular response strategy. The results are generally in line with Rohr and Locher’s (2020) investigation on discussion forums but are different from the findings of self-praise response in face-to-face oral communication (Maíz-Arévalo, 2022; Makarova, 2022). Therefore, the findings indicate that different contexts of interactions may influence interlocutors’ pragmatic strategies in response to self-praise.…”

“…Finally, the negative response manifested as the strategy of challenging was infrequently used. Although negative responses to self-praise often appear in face-to-face communication (Maíz-Arévalo, 2022;Makarova, 2022), a lack of nonverbal cues in asynchronous online communication may bring more risks of misunderstanding and damaging interpersonal relationships. Because Weibo posts and replies are public and can be seen by the blogger's other friends, a negative response to the self-praise may directly challenge and threaten the speaker's positive face and embarrass other audience who posted positive replies.…”

“…In contrast, the strategy of evasion (no response/ignorance), often used to respond to compliments, was not observed in this study. In addition, Makarova (2022) provided examples to show that responses to self-praise among adults were mostly negative, such as criticism or interruption. However, adults responded to children’s self-praise with positive attitudes.…”