Self-presentation can be defined as "the process through which individuals communicate an image of themselves to others" (Yang and Brown, 2015: 404) and it is an essential part of human communication. Self-presentation has been widely studied both in face-to-face communication and online. Most online research, however, has focused on social networking sites, blogs, chatrooms, etc. while less attention has been paid to other online means of communication such as WhatsApp despite the growing importance of WhatsApp as a means of communication. The present paper aims to redress this imbalance by analysing self-presentation on WhatsApp; more specifically, by paying attention to emotional self-presentation in profile status. To that purpose, a corpus of 206 WhatsApp statuses was gathered in Spanish. Results show the existence of recurrent patterns connected to variables such as sex 1 or age, which play a crucial role in determining the emotions users choose to display in their profile status.
Despite its apparent simplicity, the speech act of complimenting has received a great deal of attention in the literature. However, studies have mostly focused on compliments’ realization in face-to-face conversational exchanges, while they have often been neglected in other channels such as online communication. This article is intended to redress the balance in support of online exchanges. More specifically, we aim to investigate how users of online social networks like Facebook use compliments to evaluate others and strengthen social rapport in English and Spanish. In order to do so, we gathered two balanced corpora in both languages (50 examples in each language). The samples were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed using a systemic functional framework. The analysis reveals that compliments constitute a system of choices where several available options help Facebook users to encode their evaluation of the other from various perspectives (e.g. as an emotion, as an unquestionable truth, etc.). Furthermore, results also show that despite superficial similarities, compliments in both languages follow remarkably different frequencies of use which reflect deep cultural differences.
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