A Comparative Study of User-Generated Written Compliments in English: Analyzing a Compliment Object ‘Tom Yum Goong’ with Two Semantic References
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Abstract
Numerous studies investigated spoken compliments on characteristics of an entity or a person based on Holmes’ (1988) definition (Charoenroop, 2021; Ebadi & Pourzandi, 2015; Lin, 2020; Lin et al., 2012, Yuan, 2002). A handful of studies, however, explored written compliments on characteristics. With the rise of Web 2.0 technology, user-generated content (UGC) has become an increasingly popular form of content among users of various backgrounds to encode their messages using English to bridge intercultural interaction. This study compared user-generated compliments for the characteristics of ‘Tom Yum Goong’ (TYG)—a compliment object with at least two semantic references: (i) ‘food’ and (ii) a ‘movie’. The data were collected from 100 non-Thai users who made compliments in English on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and some personal blogs between 2015 and 2021. There were 114 compliments for TYG as food, 108 compliments for TYG as a movie. Results showed that strategies for spoken compliments are present in written compliments. Regardless of the semantic references, the use of positive adjectives and evaluation occurred the most frequently with a wide range of syntactic units. Most of the user-generated compliments were short and straightforward. The explicitness allows readers of various backgrounds to quickly identify the UGCs as compliments.
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