The compliment as a social strategy: a discourse analysis of on-line compliments and insults

Abstract

Compliments and insults play an important role in our daily lives, and even more when a high part of it is in social networks. Some authors have focused on research on responses to compliments (Holmes, 1986) responses to compliments on-line (Maíz-Arévalo, 2013), compliments in Japanese (Adachi, 2011), or compliments in audio-recorded, face-to-face conversations (Maíz-Arévalo, 2012). Nevertheless, little research has been done on how English compliments and insults are constructed in the comments section of famous people posts in social media. This is the aim of this text, as well as answering the following questions: what kind of compliments do fans use? What kind of insults do users employ? Do they change depending on the sexual preference of the celebrity that social networks users address? Results display that compliments and insults can be used explicitly and implicitly, although the explicit way is the most frequent type, both among compliments and insults. Also, regarding the sexual preference of celebrities, we can find that a there is a low influence over social media users when complimenting and insulting famous individuals in social networks.