Volume 16, Issue 1

Many internet users actively participate and share their views using social networks. Their behavior is sometimes unpredictable; it could be polite or impolite. This study aims to investigate impoliteness in the comment section of the Al-Jazeera Arabic news website to uncover the types of impolite acts which commenters engage in online, and expose conventionalized and non-conventionalized impoliteness triggers. It also seeks to explore the influence of computer-mediated contextual factors, such as anonymity and synchronicity on impoliteness. The study adopts Neurauter-Kessels’ framework (2011) to identify the types of face attacks and Culpeper’s bottom-up model (2011, 2016) of impoliteness triggers to classify impolite acts. The analysis shows that commenters engage in FTAs that are targeting the writers. The most frequent attack is the lack of balance, wholeness, fairness, and objectivity and the least frequent is being out of touch or having a lack of interaction with the audience. Commenters also employ both conventionalized and non-conventionalized impoliteness formulas in their face-attacks. Findings indicate that there are some distinctive features of Arabic impoliteness discourse, such as the use of colloquialisms, proverbs and idioms, religious expressions and interjections. The analysis also reveals that anonymity and asynchronicity are significant in accounting for the manifestation of impoliteness.

Although linguistic politeness has been studied and theorized about extensively, the role of prosody in the perception of (im)polite attitudes has been somewhat neglected. In the present study, we used experimental methods to investigate the interaction of linguistic form, imposition, and prosody in the perception of (im)polite requests. A written task established a baseline for the level of politeness associated with certain linguistic structures. Then stimuli were recorded in polite and rude prosodic conditions and in a perceptual experiment they were judged for politeness. Results revealed that, although both linguistic structure and prosody had a significant effect on politeness ratings, the effect of prosody was much more robust. In fact, rude prosody led in some cases to the neutralization of (extra)linguistic distinctions. The important contribution of prosody to (im)politeness inferences was also revealed by a comparison of the written and auditory tasks. These findings have important implications for models of (im)politeness and more generally for theories of affective speech. Implications for the generation of Particularized Conversational Implicatures (PCIs) of (im)politeness are also discussed.

Despite the evidence that infants are sensitive to facial cues and prosody for the detection of emotion, we have contradictory evidence regarding the use of these cues by older preschool and school children when inferring both emotional and politeness stance. This study assessed preschool aged children’s sensitivity to intonational and facial cues signalling a speaker’s polite stance in requestive speech acts with controlled lexical and contextual materials. Thirty-six 3-year-old American English-speaking children performed a forced-choice decision task which investigated whether children at this age use pitch and/or facial cues to infer a speaker’s affective stance in either audio-only, visual-only or audio-visual presentation modalities, when lexical cues are controlled for. Results showed that (a) children at three years can infer a speaker’s polite stance equally well in all three conditions (audio-only, visual-only and audio-visual) and thereby (b) unlike previous research, in the present task both intonation and facial cues are equally strong cues in children’s understanding of a speaker’s polite stance in requestive speech acts. The authors discuss especially the implications of this early use of intonation to detect politeness, relating it to other previous research on children’s ability to infer meaning from pitch.

This article addresses the relationship between linguistic politeness and addressee status in the performance of written requests in French. According to a first view, conventionalized Can you followed by a verbal phrase (in short, Can you VP? ) “indirect requests” (IRs) are preferred because they enable speakers to convey politeness effects absent in imperatives. According to an alternative view, Can you VP? is the standard polite request form in written communication because it avoids impoliteness implications. To test these two competing hypotheses, I carried out a production task experiment with 122 native speakers of Belgian French writing email requests. In this experiment, addressee status was manipulated. An important finding is that higher addressee status does not increase the frequency of Can you VP? requests. Instead of using Can you VP? more often when they address higher status people, the participants used specific politeness markers such as formal greetings and the V-form of address. These results disconfirm the hypothesis that Can you VP? is used to convey extra politeness effects and suggests instead that people use such IRs to avoid the risk of being considered impolite.