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. 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. Furthermore, results also show that despite superficial similarities, compliments in both languages follow remarkably different frequencies of use which reflect deep cultural differences. (shrink)

The category of expressive speech acts has traditionally proven elusive of definition in contrast to other types of speech acts. This might explain why this group of speech acts has been less researched. The present paper aims to redress this imbalance by analysing the expressive speech acts performed by two groups of university students in two educational chats, carried out in English or in Spanish, respectively. The main purpose of the study is to find out if students express their emotions (...) when interacting online and, if the use of their mother tongue or not affects their performance of expressive speech acts in terms of frequency and type. To this purpose, Weigand’s taxonomy of speech acts was followed, since it provides a more systematic delimitation of the traditional category of “expressive acts”. Her distinction between emotives and declaratives was thus applied to the dataset under scrutiny. Results show that students opt for performing declarative acts but refrain from expressing their own emotions in an educational setting. As for the use of English or Spanish, no significant differences were observed, which reveals that the use of their mother tongue does not seem to affect the kind of acts performed. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyse Spanish conversational structure, more concretely, to investigate in depth the role of the third move, or follow-up, outside classroom discourse. Since first introduced by Sinclair and Coulthard, the follow-up move has attracted a great deal of attention, as proved by numerous studies. However, these studies have mostly focused on English while Spanish has been neglected. The present study intends to fill in this gap by analysing a corpus of 50 conversational exchanges in (...) Peninsular Spanish. The analysis is qualitative and based on Tsui’s conversational framework, which has proved methodologically useful. As results will show, the presence or absence of the third move in Spanish conversations seems to rely heavily on a gender-based distinction. (shrink)