Chapter 3. “Pero… ¿y las caritas esas cómo se ponen?”: Age effects on Facebook compliments in Peninsular Spanish

Using a netnographic approach, the present study aims to find out whether age plays a role in the realization of the speech act of complimenting as performed by a Facebook community of Peninsular Spanish users. To that purpose, a corpus of a hundred compliments was collected. Fifty of these compliments were performed by users in the age range of 18–25 and the other fifty by users in the age range of 60–75. To control for the gender variable, only compliments produced by female users were gathered. Results show that age plays a role in the way compliments are produced, especially with regards to the use of non-verbal elements (e.g., emoji). Verbal realization strategies also show interesting differences in relation to age.