Self-Praise Across Cultures and Contexts

This book explores the extent to which self-praise is acceptable in both offline and online contexts, across different genres, platforms, and cultural backgrounds. The data analyzed encompass both naturally occurring (daily conversation as well as institutional talk) and elicited (experiments and interviews) types, and are explored at both quantitative and qualitative levels to offer a relatively systematic and comprehensive inquiry into self-praise as social (inter)action.

Contributors to this book not only draw on traditional politeness theories but are also informed by social psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, CMC, and (multimodal) discourse analysis. They are inspired by pragmatics but also go beyond to ground their studies within locally situated cultural contexts, most of which are under-presented in the current academic world. Their efforts substantiate the fact that self-praise is most worthy of intensive analytic attention. This book appeals to students and researchers in the field and contributes to the way communication is facilitated through different ways of deploying linguistic and interactional resources.

Chapter 1.Introduction: Self-Praise across Cultures and Contexts.- Part 1: Self-Praise in Digital Discourse.- Chapter 2. “I’m Your Guy”: Self-Promoting Behaviour in a Translators’ Forum.- Chapter 3. Self-Promoting: A Double-Edged Sword.- Chapter 4. “I am Bloody Amazing and so are You!”: The (Im)politeness of Self-Praise in the Instagram Posts of Fashion and Lifestyle Bloggers.- Chapter 5. Self-Praise in and through Selfies: A Multimodal Perspective.- Chapter 6. Other-Produced Self-Praise: A Mitigation Strategy.- Chapter 7. An Empirical Study of Chinese Microbloggers’ Explicit Self-Praises.- Part 2: Self-Praise in Face-to-Face Discourse.- Chapter 8. Self-praise in Peninsular Spanish Face-to-Face Interaction.- Chapter 9. Self-Praise in BELF Meetings.- Chapter 10. The Self, the Other, the Tribe, and the Divine: Self-Praise Discourse in Jordanian Arabic.- Chapter 11. Self-Praise in the Mexican Context: A Sociocultural Approach.- Part 3: Self-Praise in Public Discourse.- Chapter 12. TheDouble-Edged Practice of Self-Praise and Self-Denigration in Korean Public Discourse.- Chapter 13. Self-Praise in Czech Television Talk Shows.- Chapter 14. Self-Praise in Russian: A Wild Goose Chase.- Chapter 15. “I am Well-Loved by the Voters.”: Self-Praise in Thai Political Discourse and Two Emic Concepts of Thai (im)politeness.

Chaoqun Xie is a chair professor of linguistics and applied linguistics at the School of English Studies, Zhejiang International Studies University, China. Internet pragmatics and (im)politeness are his current primary scholarly interests. His recent edited volumes include (Im)politeness and Moral Order in Online Interactions (John Benjamins, 2020), originally published as special issue of Internet Pragmatics 1:2 (2018), Approaches to Internet Pragmatics: Theory and Practice (co-edited with Francisco Yus and Hartmut Haberland, John Benjamins, 2021), The Philosophy of (Im)politeness (Springer, 2021), and The Pragmatics of Internet Memes (John Benjamins, 2022), originally published as special issue of Internet Pragmatics 3:2 (2020).

Ying Tong is a lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages, Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, China. Her research interests cover (im)politeness, (multimodal) discourse analysis, and pragmatic acts in social media. Her publications appeared in such journals as Internet Pragmatics, Pragmatics, and Pragmatics and Society.