Self-praising, praise-seeking, and other-praising: motivations and strategies of the Kuakua genre

Abstract

Abstract In this study, we investigate the Kuakua (夸夸 ‘praise’) genre, an innovative internet linguistic phenomenon found on Chinese social media, using data collected from various social media platforms. We demonstrate that, different from similar speech acts of compliment/praise on English social media such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), the Kuakua genre, which takes place within internet communities, includes praise-seeking in addition to self-praising and other-praising. Adopting the motivation model of pragmatics as our analytical framework, we propose that the three types of praise in the Kuakua genre result from an intricate interplay between different motivations relating to enhancing the image/face of self and other. Specifically, the acts of self-praising and praise-seeking are motivated by the need to maintain and/or enhance self-image/face while other-praising, either as a response to praise-seeking or as a voluntary act, is motivated primarily by other-image/face and secondarily by self-image/face. These different motivations lead to different strategies, which we also discuss in considerable detail. Our paper therefore contributes to the study of language use on the Internet, politeness, and the field of pragmatics in general, for it reveals several features of praise that have not been found in the literature.