Volume 20, Issue 2

This paper investigates the formal, conceptual, and functional characteristics of impoliteness in social media interactions, arguing that face-threatening acts can be viewed as an effective manifestation of social capital if delivered in a way that has potential to grant the user distinction in cyberspace – the process contingent on recognition by some groups and elimination of others. As argued in the following, social capital manifests itself through a distinct habitus that exploits relevant cultural resources specific to social media interactions for the purpose of successful differentiation between spaces and participants in this context. In order to account for the complex, richly intertextual nature of creative impoliteness on social media, the study introduces the concept of “e-mpoliteness,” which refers not only to the surface form of the examined instances but also to the plethora of other resources and references that instantiate the habitus of meaning-making in online discourse.

The field of (im)politeness studies has been steadily growing and developing but the role of conventionality and the type of semiotic system (e.g., language vs. gesture) for impoliteness perception has not been sufficiently explored. We used a cognitive-semiotic framework combining a reaction-time experiment and in-depth interviews with sixty participants to explore how Russian and Swedish native speakers evaluate and describe highly and less conventional impolite behaviour expressed either through speech or through gesture. The results showed a positive correlation between the conventionality of expressions and how impolite they are judged to be, and that highly conventional expressions lead to faster judgements. Few differences were found between impolite expressions in the experiment, but some were reflected in the interviews. Further, we found that Swedish participants evaluated language and gestures as very impolite more often than Russian participants did. We discuss these findings through the lens of the proposed framework and offer a three-dimensional analysis of the concept of conventionality in terms of frequency, normativity, and encodedness.

This paper explores (im)politeness conceptualizations and evaluations and the moral foundations of lay notions of (im)politeness in Syrian Arabic. The data were collected using an online questionnaire which was administered to 88 native speaking participants. The results show that participants consider politeness and impoliteness as polar opposites; both are viewed as (in)consideration for others, chiefly conveyed through (dis)respect, and upholding/violating appropriate behaviors, respectively. Moreover, the results show that notions of hierarchical respect, face, equity rights, reciprocity, and attending to others’ needs are central in motivating participants’ views of (im)politeness. These notions are rooted in the moral foundations of authority/respect, fairness/reciprocity, and harm/care. Additionally, interesting findings emerge in that politeness in Syrian Arabic appears to be more of a relational phenomenon, based on morality, which is in line with contemporary views on politeness, than a rational and strategic behavior, as theorized in classical approaches.

This paper examines aggravated impoliteness in online restaurant reviews, with a dataset consisting of 92 negative reviews from the Chinese-based website Dazhongdianping . It first analyzes the usage and frequency of different types of aggravated impoliteness strategies. The topic categories of the review samples are then investigated, and the connection between these two aspects is further discussed. The variety of aggravated impoliteness strategies includes: preceding intensifiers, indignant exclamations, unpalatable questions, emoji, postpositional intensifiers, unfavorable comparisons, emphatic structure and taboo words, in decreasing order of frequency. These strategies are employed in connection with the ratings of: food, service, general experience, interpersonal judgments, price and environment. This study contributes to the impoliteness research by investigating the aggravated impoliteness in Chinese online data, and also enriches and provides insights into research on the genre of online consumer reviews.

Studies on online advice-giving have focused on non-profit public platforms but rarely examined it in commercial contexts, where the advisor has the motive of seeking economic interests. This study investigates advice-giving in the first five-minute part of paid live talks, which is free but designed to entice the audience to pay for the remaining part. Transcripts of 123 five-minute recordings are collected. This study analyzes individual speakers’ use of discursive moves and the corresponding relational strategies, as well as their effectiveness in boosting online sales. The results indicate that four discursive moves, i.e., metacomment, general information, advice, and assessment, are the most frequently used, with a large majority of advice phrased in declaratives. Statistical analysis showed that inexperienced, non-expert, and low-community-status speakers tend to use more bonding, and expert, experienced, high-community-status, and male speakers prefer to use more hedging. In addition, the effects of bonding, empathizing, and hedging on sales are consistently positive, while those of criticizing are negative; the above effects are moderated by the speaker’s social status. This study adds to the understudied issue of advisors’ relational negotiations and their resultant outcome in public commercial contexts.

Public and academic debate suggest a perception that institutions such as the police may be reluctant to apologise or ineffective when they do. This article takes the unusual step of considering the apology culture of the institution potentially offering apology as a crucial step in identifying possible barriers to change in institutional practice. I have analysed explicit apology language in letters written by Scottish police to individuals as a final stage in responding to their complaints about the police. Rather than police reluctance to apologise, I found the police potentially overusing apology language, in the sense that explicit apology language was consistently used where evidence both had and had not been found that the police were at fault. The grammatical construction of the explicit apology language differed between these two contexts. I conclude that police politeness culture includes an empirical norm to use explicit apology language in response to public complaints regardless of the outcome of that complaint, as part of their identity as a public service institution. Tension between this empirical norm and another aspect of police identity, as a law enforcement institution, is managed by a systematic grammatical distinction in apology language patterning with the complaint outcome.

Drawing on a Symbolic Interactionist perspective and the Grounded Theory methodology, this study aimed to explore self-denigration from the perspective of Iranian applied linguists highlighting the significance of self-denigration as an in-group relational ritual in Iranian doctoral defense sessions. The data were obtained from rigorous coding of the transcripts of two focus groups and a questionnaire built on the findings of the focus group discussions. The findings indicated significant gender differences in terms of the participants’ attitudes toward the functions and meanings of self-denigration. Academic experience was also found to be an important factor in how the participants perceived self-denigration. Through a meticulous analysis of self-denigration in doctoral defense sessions, the present study sheds light on the norms and conventions of the academic discourse of defense sessions, thereby justifying the rights and obligations of the defense session participants.

This study provides a corpus-assisted pragmatic investigation of three Japanese expressions: the adverb chotto ‘a little’, the verb-ending form -te shimau , conveying (formulaic) regret, and the conditional clause with -tara . These are deictic forms I refer to as indexical signs for (im)politeness because they can, under certain circumstances, trigger evaluations in terms of (im)politeness, potentially favouring an indirect interpretation of the utterance. They are investigated in co-occurrence with apology-like behaviour based on the assumption that, in this context, interactants are more likely to exploit linguistic strategies for conveying additional layers of pragmatic meaning. The main findings point to a wide range of possible interactional meanings the selected forms can acquire in naturally occurring data, from affecting the illocutionary force of the utterance, to conventionally matching interactants’ expectations, to conveying a potentially face-threatening act. These results support the assumption that seemingly polite speech acts will not necessarily be doing polite work (or not only) and highlight the relevance of the interactional context for retrieving communicative meanings.

The pragmatic marker ha 哈 in Mandarin, has little meaning in itself; while some studies have looked into its usage in spoken discourse, we seek to address its usage and unpack its specific interpersonal pragmatic function in online, private, dyadic discourse, itself an underexplored area, and a setting in which participants are free from public scrutiny, unlike on mass social media. The results demonstrate that it can be attached to clauses and sentences to show the affect of the writer, from indicating a jocular and playful tone to softening a request. Therefore, ha is used as a way to express different types of rapport orientations and positive self-presentation. By drawing on personal WeChat messages, this paper bridges the gap by focusing on ha in technologically-mediated conversation. The expanding usage of ha also suggests a wish to create linguistic forms which can act as substitutes for non-verbal communication features.

This paper aims to explore the influences of prosody on (im)politeness perception in intercultural communication. Based on empirical data collected in perceptual experiments, the paper compares the perception of the (im)politeness prosodic properties of L1 German speakers and L2 German speakers of Chinese origin. It was found that the two subject groups show clear distinctions in their (im)politeness perceptions and that prosodic features exert different impacts on (im)politeness perception: L2 German speakers of Chinese origin perceive lower acoustic intensity, more pauses, and lower muscle tension as indicators of higher level of politeness, whereas the opposite holds true for L1 German speakers. In addition, the former demonstrate higher sensitivity to speech rate and modal particle stress than the latter. The study’s findings indicate that (im)politeness and prosody perception are influenced by people’s first language and home-grown culture, and a prosodic mitigation strategy may not be fully applicable in intercultural communication.

This paper is an attempt to explore the realisation and motives of off-record indirectness as a common mode of conversation in naturally occurring social interactions in Jordanian Arabic. It is found that off-record indirectness mirrors speaker’s considerateness of the face wants of the speech act recipient, communicating face-threatening acts indirectly. The need to be polite justifies conversation partners’ deliberate flouting of Grice’s maxims and using conversational implicatures. Indirect means of communication and the employment of abbreviated conversations are also used for humour and as a preferred style and solidarity marker among family members, intimates and closely related people. It is also found that there are instances of off-record indirectness that might be perceived as impolite. In support of other scholars’ arguments, the study stresses that instances of off-record indirectness which might be perceived as impolite in terms of first-order politeness are doing interactional facework in terms of second-order politeness. Indirectness, then, may always be face work but is not always politeness.

In this paper, we revisit the popular assumption that politeness in languages such as Japanese and Korean with a complex honorific system is crucially different from politeness in languages with no comparably rich honorific repertoires, such as Chinese. We propose a bottom–up, contrastive and corpus-based model through which we challenge this binary view. This model combines interaction ritual and speech acts. As a case study, we compare a set of expressions representing lexico-grammatical honorifics in Japanese and Chinese, i.e., in a so-called “honorific-rich” and a “non-honorific-rich” language. Our results show that the group of honorifics studied work in an essentially comparable fashion, hence disproving the above-outlined binary view.

Previous research has shown that attentiveness ( kikubari ) is a significant aspect of politeness in Japanese. The aim of this paper is to expand on earlier research on attentiveness by using Twitter data and examine how Japanese lay people understand and/or evaluate attentiveness and how attentiveness manifests politeness. The data for this study were 600 Japanese tweets which contain attentiveness. They were coded based on analysis of the content and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that Japanese lay people evaluate attentiveness positively and that they think attentiveness is important in most cases. These results reflect a commonly held belief in Japanese culture, namely that attentiveness is a virtue. In some posts, the demonstrators of attentiveness appeared to infer the needs of the potential recipients and made pre-emptive offers, as they had known the situations of the potential recipients. Attentiveness in such posts coincides with the definition of attentiveness in previous research. In some other posts, attentiveness is used in the sense of consideration, which was included in the conceptualisation of politeness in Japanese. These results confirmed earlier findings and further our understanding of them through concrete examples from Twitter.