Self-praise on Chinese social networking sites

Abstract

Self-praise involves disclosing positive content about oneself, and such disclosures can be treated as self-elevating acts. This study adds to the growing literature on self-praise, especially in online contexts, by analysing pragmatic strategies in Chinese online self-praise from a dataset of 300 user-generated microblogs on Weibo. This study analyses the frequency and percentage of each self-praise strategy deployed by Chinese users, supplemented by a qualitative analysis of individual strategies with examples. It was found that three main pragmatic strategy categories are employed for self-praise in Chinese microblogs, namely explicit self-praise without modification, modified explicit self-praise, and implicit self-praise, in decreasing order of frequency. This study also generates hypotheses to discuss self-praising on microblogs and provides insights for research on self-praise.