Within the framework of politeness theory, self-praise has traditionally been described as a problematic speech act, as it violates the "modesty maxim" (Leech 1983) and disregards the interlocutor's feelings, thus posing a threat to their positive face (Brown & Levinson 1987). Although subsequent studies have demonstrated that certain contexts, such as job interviews (e.g., Stevens & Kristof 1995) or social media (e.g., Dayter 2018), impose fewer restrictions on self-praise, most research focusing on this speech act in offline contexts (Speer 2012, Maíz-Arévalo 2021, Itakura 2022) or online interactions (e.g., Dayter 2014, Matley 2018, Tobback 2019a, b, Ren & Guo 2020, Rüdiger & Dayter 2020) has found that self-praise is frequently accompanied by pragmatic strategies designed to mitigate its risky nature.
This paper shifts the focus from self-praise by individuals to the self-praise strategies employed by corporate entities, specifically French and U.S. companies, in press releases published on their corporate websites. The inherently self-promotional nature of press releases, as well as the potential risks associated with excessive promotional language in this genre, have been well documented in the literature (e.g., Pander Maat 2007, Catenaccio 2008, De Cock & Granger 2021). Similarly, Jacobs (1999) described a set of pragmatic strategies, some of which align with Brown & Levinson’s (1987) negative politeness strategies, aimed at enhancing the credibility of press releases. However, to date, no study has explicitly adopted the framework of linguistic politeness to examine the realization of self-praise in press releases.
Our study is based on a corpus of 40 electronic press releases published between 2021 and 2022 on the corporate websites of two major French and two leading US retail companies. To ensure consistency, we selected only press releases focused on commercial information. Textual analysis was conducted on the full content of the press releases, except for the "boilerplate" sections.
A quantitative comparison shows that US press releases contain significantly more self-praise markers (SPMs) than their French counterparts, suggesting greater assertiveness in American corporate discourse. However, mitigation strategies, such as third-party praise, implicit praise, and self-quotation, were applied in broadly similar ways across the two corpora. While some mild cross-cultural tendencies emerged - such as a slightly greater French preference for more opaque forms of self-praise - the overall patterns suggest that, within the corporate communication context, the modesty principle may be constrained by genre-related expectations, with cultural norms playing a more limited role.
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