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Gender stereotypes and communication styles: a case study of compliments on Facebook in Jordan

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Published/Copyright: July 16, 2025
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
From the journal Lodz Papers in Pragmatics Volume 21 Issue 2

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of gender stereotypes on communication styles, specifically investigating how the gender of Jordanians may affect their selection of compliments on Facebook. The analysis is based on a corpus of 200 compliments and 200 compliment responses collected from the platform. The researchers utilized the model developed by Eslami et al. (2019. Online compliments of Iranian Facebook users. In From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness: Multilingual and multicultural perspectives, 68–92) for data analysis. A mixed-method approach was employed to analyze the data both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results revealed that mixed compliments, which combine verbal and non-verbal elements, were the most frequently used (66 %), followed by verbal compliments (30 %) and non-verbal compliments (4 %). Among both verbal and mixed compliments, explicit compliments emerged as the most prevalent type (73 %). Gender differences were observed in lexical choices and the use of modifiers. Males tended to favor expressions associated with masculinity and social authority, while females used more emotionally driven and aesthetically focused language. These findings suggest that online platforms, such as Facebook, both reflect and reinforce traditional gender roles within the Jordanian society. This analysis could lead to a better understanding of how gender and different cultural backgrounds shape communication styles on social media platforms.

Keywords: pragmatics; communication styles; compliments; Facebook; gender
Corresponding author: Aseel Zibin, English Language and Literature Department, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan; and Applied Science Private University, Amman, Jordan, E-mail:

  1. Conflicts of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  2. Research funding: The paper was not funded.

  3. Data availability: The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study will be made available upon request.

  4. AI statement: AI tools were used to proofread some sentences as the authors are not native speakers of English. However, we reviewed the paper after and we take full responsibility for its contents.

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Received: 2024-12-08
Accepted: 2025-06-18
Published Online: 2025-07-16
Published in Print: 2025-12-17

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Gender stereotypes and communication styles: a case study of compliments on Facebook in Jordan
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  5. “Neuronal ideology”: grammatical metaphor and the naturalisation of neoliberal subjectivities in neurobiological research papers
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  7. Exploring linguistic and cognitive-communicative aspects of vernacular toponyms: a comparative study of English and Kazakh languages
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https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2024-0063
Keywords for this article
pragmatics; communication styles; compliments; Facebook; gender

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. Gender stereotypes and communication styles: a case study of compliments on Facebook in Jordan
  4. Question is the source of knowledge: question-asking executed by patients during online medical consultation
  5. “Neuronal ideology”: grammatical metaphor and the naturalisation of neoliberal subjectivities in neurobiological research papers
  6. Speech acts in herders-farmers’ conflict in Nigerian newspaper headlines
  7. Exploring linguistic and cognitive-communicative aspects of vernacular toponyms: a comparative study of English and Kazakh languages
  8. Framing the Russo-Ukrainian war: Western media representations in year two of the full-scale invasion
  9. Book Review
  10. Teaching and testing second language pragmatics and interaction: a practical guide, Carsten Roever. Routledge, New York (2022)
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