The Contrastive Investigation Into The Pragmatic Strategies Of Humblebragging Between Chinese And English Social Media

The term Versailles Literature has changed semantically since it gained popularity in China.Versailles in essence refers to the speech act of humblebragging,and is prevalent and topical in both English and Chinese pragmatic research.People in English-speaking contexts often employ pragmatic strategies to mitigate the face threat posed by the act.However,the pragmatic strategies of humblebragging may differ in Chinese contexts from those in English contexts,presumably due to differences in social norms,cultural variances,and other reasons.Therefore,this study aims to investigate and compare the pragmatic strategies of the speech act of humblebragging in Chinese and English social media and to further explore the possible reasons behind their similarities and differences.This thesis attempts to answer three research questions:(1)What pragmatic strategies are used in Versailles in Chinese social media?(2)What pragmatic strategies are used in Humblebrag in English-language social media?(3)What are the similarities and differences between Versailles and Humblebrag? And what are the possible reasons for such similarities and differences? This study takes a corpusdriven approach to address the three research questions.A metapragmatic approach was taken to collect data and thereby to compile a corpus of Versailles in Chinese and a corpus of Humblebrag in English.The Chinese corpus contains 522 postings of Versailles drawn from three Chinese online social platforms,Baidu Tieba,Weibo,and Douban.The English corpus was compiled with 483 instances of Humblebrag drawn from three English-language social networking sites,Twitter,Facebook,and Reddit.It is found that the act of humblebragging in the Chinese context includes seven pragmatic strategies,namely,narration,complaint,fake humility,help-seeking,reference to a third party,alert,and various combinations of these six strategies.In the English context,there are eight strategies in total.Apart from the same seven strategies shared with Versailles,there is also an emphasis.The findings have revealed the following similarities and differences.First,both Chinese and English humblebraggers tend to use the strategies of narration,complaint,and fake humility.Second,in terms of the strategy of fake humility,Chinese social media users prefer self-denigration,while English-speaking social media users prefer the ‘sorry but not sorry’ apologetic attitude.Third,the strategy of emphasis is only presented in English data.Fourth,the strategy alert,which aggravates face threat,is preferred by English social media users.Last,the social media users of the two different contexts have similar concerns about face and social norms,but the differences in culture and politeness may affect their choice of pragmatic strategies when engaging in the facethreatening behaviour.This study explores the speech act of humblebragging in Chinese and English contexts,which provides some insights into cross-cultural pragmatic research as well as Second Language Pragmatics pedagogy.On the one hand,this study reveals the cross-cultural differences in the use of humblebragging,thereby contributing to exploring the association between pragmatics,culture and social norms.On the other hand,a contrastive research approach could facilitate the effective and systematic teaching and learning of Second Language Pragmatics,as it involves the understanding of the socio-cultural differences in performing pragmatic functions.