A Study of Parents’ Ostensible Praise in Adolescent Families

Parents' ostensible praise is a pervasive yet intricate speech act in parent-child communication, which diverges significantly from authentic praise and carries implicit evaluations and veiled expectations, which impedes effective parent-child communication to a certain extent. Based on conjoint co-constituting model of communication and the guanxi space as theoretical frameworks, this paper discovers 5 types of ostensible praise including extreme praise, perfunctory praise, results-oriented praise, comparative praise and frequent praise from authentic data. The findings of this study are empirical endeavours in interpersonal pragmatics and can offer valuable guidance for families to improve parent-adolescent relationships through improvement of discursive practices.