Comparison between Chinese and Japanese self-praise on social media

Abstract

Self-praise is attracting increasing attention in pragmatics and discourse studies. However, Japanese self-praise has rarely been investigated, particularly in online communication. In addition, few studies have examined self-praise from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective. Therefore, this study compares Chinese and Japanese self-praise on social media, based on 300 instances of Chinese self-praise on Weibo and 300 instances of Japanese self-praise on Twitter. The findings show that the Chinese and Japanese netizens both produced three categories of self-praise: explicit self-praise without modification, modified explicit self-praise, and implicit self-praise, in the same order of decreasing frequency. The Chinese netizens most frequently employed the modified explicit self-praise strategies “disclaimer”, “praise from a third party”, and “referring to the group”, while their Japanese counterparts preferred the modified explicit self-praise strategy “change of praise focus” and the implicit strategy “self-praise as sharing”. The study discusses the similarities and differences between these two groups’ social media self-praise, particularly with regard to the affordances of social media and pragmatic norms in the two cultures.