A Pragmatic Study of Self-Depreciation in Social Media Context

Abstract

Recent years have seen renewed interest in pragmatic research within the realm of social media platforms. This article collected self-depreciation discourse as the linguistic data on the platform of “Xiaohongshu” to investigate the themes, strategies and causes by the use of the thematic and discourse analysis method. The findings of this study reveal that the themes of self- depreciation discourse prominently focus on competence and achievement. The pragmatic strategies can be divided into three types, namely, explicit, modified, and implicit self-denigration. The phenomenon of self-depreciation is influenced by traditional perception, social environment, and the context of the internet. This paper aims to make a valuable contribution to the research in the field of internet pragmatics.