Compliments in congratulatory tweets to Spanish Olympic athletes

In this chapter we examine the form and function of compliments in congratulatory tweets sent to Spanish athletes during the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. The study is based on a corpus of 500 tweets taken from the profiles of 14 Spanish athletes (5–21 August 2016). Compliments play an important role in congratulatory remarks as they serve to either realize congratulations or to support them. Findings show that congratulatory acts supported by compliments or stand-alone compliments acting as congratulatory acts exceed tweets of congratulatory remarks alone. The use of direct compliments is found more frequently within the corpus than indirect ones, with elliptical and vocative constructions being the most prominent. It is suggested that this may be a consequence of the tendency to conciseness of Twitter and other social networks.