Humble-Bragging in Digital Discourse: A Lexical-Pragmatic Analysis of Indirect Self-Promotion on Social Media

Abstract

This study examines humble-bragging as a form of indirect self-presentation in digital discourse through a lexical-pragmatic analysis of 1,001 social media posts. Drawing on corpus linguistics, sentiment analysis, and pragmatic interpretation, the study investigates the linguistic patterns, collocational tendencies, and communicative functions that characterise humble-bragging on social media platforms. Guided by Speech Act Theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, and politeness theory, the analysis demonstrates how humble-bragging operates through strategic violations of conversational maxims, particularly those of Quality and Quantity, to generate implicatures that subtly foreground personal achievements while maintaining an appearance of modesty. The findings identify two dominant forms of humble-bragging: complaint-based variants, which frame success as burden or inconvenience through negative affect language, and humility-based variants, which employ gratitude and modesty markers to present achievements as undeserved or externally attributed. Nevertheless, many posts display hybrid pragmatic features that blur the distinction between these categories, suggesting that humble-bragging functions along a broader continuum of indirect self-promotion. The study further highlights the interpretive ambiguity of humble-bragging, as its meaning relies heavily on audience inference and contextual understanding. These findings contribute to research on digital discourse, speech acts, politeness, and online self-presentation by offering a nuanced account of how users negotiate modesty and visibility in contemporary social media communication.