Relational acts & interactive features by Chinese celebrities on social media : a comparison of the Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong

Abstract

The paper attempts to investigate speech acts and features used by Chinese celebrities to build public persona on social media, with a comparison between the Chinese mainland (on Weibo) and Hong Kong (on Facebook) and a revisit of politeness theories for Chinese. Three months of postings by twelve most-followed Weibo and Twitter celebrities from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong have been retrieved and analyzed. It is found that the prevalent relational acts commonly used by both Weibo and Facebook celebrities include sharing personal information, retweeting others’ information, inviting response, and expressing stance, etc.; and the commonly prevalent interactive features include the use of emoticons and other graphic symbols, orality, codemixing, and Netspeak, etc. Nonetheless, differences also exist in that while Weibo celebrities tend to use more acts of inviting response and directives, Facebook celebrities use many more acts of retweeting information and online video sharing; Weibo celebrities tend to use more Netspeak whereas Facebook celebrities use more codemixing. Using English only also appears on the posts of Facebook celebrities. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion and explanation of the commonalities and differences between Weibo and Facebook celebrities. 本文旨在考察名人在中文社交媒體上與粉絲進行互動關係的言語行為和特徵，比較名人在內地與香港兩地主流社交媒體（微博及臉書）中的異同。文章最後對內地與香港的異同做了進一步的闡釋，並對當今華人面子及禮貌行為理論做了進一步的探討。