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Complimenting Behavior and (Self-)Praise across Social Media: New contexts and new insights
Edited by María Elena Placencia and Zohreh R. Eslami
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 313] 2020
► pp. 73–98

Chapter 3
“Pero… y las caritas esas, ¿cómo se ponen?”

Age effects on Facebook compliments in Peninsular Spanish

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Using a netnographic approach, the present study aims to find out whether age plays a role in the realization of the speech act of complimenting as performed by a Facebook community of Peninsular Spanish users. To that purpose, a corpus of a hundred compliments was collected. Fifty of these compliments were performed by users in the age range of 18–25 and the other fifty by users in the age range of 60–75. To control for the gender variable, only compliments produced by female users were gathered. Results show that age plays a role in the way compliments are produced, especially with regards to the use of non-verbal elements (e.g., emoji). Verbal realization strategies also show interesting differences in relation to age.

Keywords: Facebook, age, compliments, Peninsular Spanish, netnography
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Online compliments
    • 2.2Language use and age
    • 2.3Linguistic patterns of compliments
      • i.Exclamative pronoun + (semantically positive) adjective / noun phrase + (copulative verb)
      • ii.Declarative sentence
    • 2.4Linguistic features according to age
      • i.Typographic variation and use of emoji
      • ii.Lexical choices
      • iii.Prolixity
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Data gathering procedure and corpus description
    • 3.3Ethical issues
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Linguistic patterns and age
    • 4.2Typographic variation and emoji
    • 4.3Lexical choices
    • 4.4Prolixity
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.313.03mai
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