Complimenting behaviour and (self-)praise across social media: new contexts and new insights

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, in both private and public domains, 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