Publication
Title
Telling the world how skilful you are : self-praise strategies on LinkedIn
Author
Abstract
Self-praise has traditionally been interpreted as a potentially face threatening act, which infringes the 'Modesty Maxim' proposed by Leech. Certain discourse genres, however, like application letters, job interviews or the LinkedIn summaries which are the research object of this article serve, by definition, to promote the professional as skilful. Hence, the question arises to what extent these discourse genres take into account the (potentially) risky nature of self-praise. On the basis of a corpus of some 90 French and US LinkedIn summaries, this article shows, on one hand, that besides asserting explicitly which competent identity and skills one has, LinkedIn-members use a whole array of more or less subtle indirect strategies to express skilfulness, including strategies pertaining to the area of reported speech. On the other hand, the analysis reveals that downgrading devices are hardly attested, contrary to upgrading modifiers, which also exhibit a remarkable variation.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Discourse & communication. - London, 2007, currens
Publication
London : 2019
ISSN
1750-4813 [print]
1750-4821 [online]
DOI
10.1177/1750481319868854
Volume/pages
13 :6 (2019) , p. 647-668
ISI
000485260800004
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Publication type
Subject
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 07.10.2019
Last edited 09.10.2023
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