A Pragmatic Study of Self-praise in Stand-up Comedies

Abstract

Scholars have ignored self-praise, a speech act of boasting oneself and a way of positive self-presentation and self-evaluation, for many years due to its violation of the modesty maxim and self-denigration maxim. While as an emerging “Versailles-style” discourse pattern, self-praise used by communicators to positively evaluate their praiseworthiness are becoming to be paid attention to researchers. Drawing on the Dramaturgical Theory, this study adopted a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis methods with the help of NVivo (version 12) to code and classify 155 collected self-praise corpus in Rock &Roast 5, analyzing pragmatic strategies, topic distribution and effects of self-praise used by stand-up comedians. In this study, self-praise is categorized into three types: explicit self-praise without modification, modified explicit self-praise containing six sub-strategies, and implicit self-praise with four sub-strategies. Meanwhile, the topics of self-praise mostly focused on individuals themselves and personal experiences. Comedians frequently used self-praise speech acts to express their praiseworthiness and construct their positive personal identity, so as to make a humorous program effectiveness and leave a deep impression on the audience.