#greenCNPC, #CleanerEnergy: Pragmatic use of self-praise metaphors in Chinese corporate discourse on Twitter/X

Abstract

In an era of globalized corporate communication, Chinese corporations face a pragmatic challenge of balancing cultural norms of modesty with the imperative of self-promotion on international social media platforms like Twitter/X. While metaphors offer an indirect strategy to moderate self-praise, their role in facilitating communication accommodation, particularly in cross-cultural contexts, remains understudied. This study uses the qualitative corpus analysis of tweets to investigate how two leading Chinese petroleum corporations strategically employ metaphors on Twitter to frame self-praise. This study identifies fourteen high-frequency metaphors (green, clean, friend, partner, home, smart, warm, high, low, lead, progress, advance, protect, and record) across four source domains (object, human, journey, and competition), encoding four key attributes of corporate self-praise: propriety, capacity, normality, and tenacity. Crucially, they modulate self-praise intensity via three tiers of pragmatic explicitness: explicit self-praise metaphors directly highlighting positive qualities; conventional self-praise ones aligning with cultural norms; contextual self-praise ones deriving positivity from situational framing. The analysis reveals how self-praise metaphors facilitate communication accommodation through enhancing interpretability, balancing interpersonal control, facilitating discourse management, and fostering emotional empathy. This study highlights metaphor as a dual pragmatic tool of mediating self-praise indirectness and communication accommodation and offers actionable strategies for enterprises to navigate global discourse.