“The power of compliments on social media platform – Instagram”

Absztrakt (kivonat)

Over the decades, the speech act of complimenting has garnered considerable attention in the linguistic literature. However, most research has concentrated on the realization of compliments in face-to-face verbal engagements, while they are frequently disregarded in other channels like digital communication. (Maíz-Arévalo, C., & García-Gómez, A., 2013). This research gap is all the more relevant in light of the fact that social media has developed its own structure of pragmatics and compliment behavior (Placencia, M. E., & Lower, A., 2017). Holmes and Brown (1987), stated that compliments are being considered as ‘remarkably formulaic speech acts’. However, aside from verbal forms of compliments, emoji are increasingly used as an alternative to express them. Compliments also take a look at emojis as opposed to written language, showing how the former fulfill the same functions as the latter, namely to convey ideas and to influence the attitudes of others. On that account, the theoretical background would be focused on pragmatic theories of compliments, and as well as how nonverbal communication takes place in complimenting. Therefore, the objectives of this paper is to find out how Instagram users compliment models when it comes to appearance, and within the framework of these criteria how emoji are used as compliments in an online setting. In order to test these research questions, the methodology section will rely on a qualitative research method, where three Instagram models’ accounts will be taken into consideration (Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Hailey Bieber). The data of compliments will be gathered from Instagram comments under models’ pictures posted within the period of the Spring-Summer season from 01 March until 31 August 2021. The obtained end result of this research study provides a novel approach both theoretical and empirical to the analysis of complementation via emoji on Instagram, thus expanding our knowledge of compliment strategies.