I Complimenti su Facebook

This paper deals with Italian compliment responses (henceforth, CR) elicited on the social network Facebook. It is worth to note that this paper represent a first attempt to analyze the stylistic variation of CRs in Italian on social networks. The main aim of the analysis is to highlight similarities and differences in responding to compliments related to physical attributes, both intrinsic (eyes, hair), and transient (look, haircut), in virtual and natural communication, by comparing Facebook CRs to Castagneto & Ravetto’s corpus. The analysis will also show which CR strategy is preferred on Facebook, by also emphasizing a possible “danger-scale” of compliments based on the provided responses. Finally, it will be discussed how the different textual typologies allowed on Facebook interact with the pragmatic strategies of CRs, in particular as concerns the so-called “like” strategy.