Strategies of positive evaluation in computer-mediated communication

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the results of our research into the politeness strategy of complimenting or giving positive evaluations in English on the Internet with a specific focus on comments responding to selected YouTube music videos. Compliments in face-to-face interactions have been widely studied for decades, with a new tendency emerging: the occurrence of compliments and compliment responses in digital contexts (Placencia and Lower 2016). Although there is no obvious formula for expressing compliments, research shows that there seems to be a limited number of patterns used for their construction (Válková 2012). On the corpus of complimentary evaluations in online comments on music (modern and classical), we aim to show to what extent the variety of forms conforms to the types presented in the available material and whether there are any essential differences in the characteristic lexical and syntactic repertoire with respect to the selected music genres.