“cause ur special”: Understanding trust and complimenting behaviour in online grooming discourse

•It offers new insights into the speech act of complimenting in digital contexts.•It identifies key topics and syntactic patterns of compliments in online grooming.•It examines how online groomers' use of praise to build deceptive trust.•Findings can inform the development of online grooming prevention software.

Online Grooming is the process whereby an adult gains the trust of a minor in order to exploit him/her, through the use of cyber-technology. Despite a global increase in online sexual exploitation, research into online grooming is scant, especially from a linguistic perspective. Our study examines online groomers' attempts at gaining their targets' trust through compliments. This focus is justified by the fact that, although praise is known to be used regularly in online and offline grooming, its linguistic realisation via the speech act of complimenting has not been analysed to date. We analyse the topics, syntactic realisation patterns and discourse functions of a corpus of 1268 compliments extracted from 68 online grooming interactions. The results point to (1) a prevalence of compliments about physical appearance, of both a sexual and a non-sexual orientation, which increases alongside speed of grooming; (2) high syntactic formulaicity levels regardless of speed of grooming; and (3) use of compliments to frame and support online grooming processes that seek to isolate the targets, provide the online groomers' with sexual gratification and enable them to gauge the targets' compliance levels. Overall, the results both provide new insights into the speech act of complimenting from a hitherto unexamined communicative context and contribute to understanding the communicative process of online grooming.