Startseite Linguistik & Semiotik (Im)politeness on Facebook during the Covid-19 pandemic
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(Im)politeness on Facebook during the Covid-19 pandemic

  • Jean Mathieu Tsoumou ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 31. August 2022

Abstract

Digital discourse has emerged as a substantial focus of interest within the pragmatic field. Specifically, (im)politeness practices on social media have increasingly received scholarly attention in the last decade (Tagg, Caroline, Philip Seargeant & Amy Aisha Brown. 2017. Taking offence on social media. Conviviality and conviviality and communication on Facebook. Switzerland: Springer Nature, Palgrave McMillan; Tsoumou, Jean Mathieu. 2020. Analyzing speech acts in politically related Facebook communication. Journal of Pragmatics 167. 80–97). However, research combining COVID-19, Facebook and (im)politeness in a politically polarizing context is still scarce. This paper is an analysis of (im)politeness in Facebook comments posted as reactions to Giuliani’s COVID diagnosis. Thus, by combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the aim of the present paper is twofold: On the one hand, it intends to further our understanding of the manifestation of (im)politeness practices on Facebook through an analysis of reactive comments to Giuliani’s Covid-19 diagnosis on BBC news Facebook page. On the other hand, the paper aims to examine how the struggle between impoliteness and politeness divides Facebook users between sympathizers and detractors of the patient. Through a metadiscursive analysis, the identified (im)politeness items are distributed in an uneven fashion, with impoliteness-oriented items prevailing as the dominant macro category against politeness-oriented ones. The findings suggest that users employ different strategies to express or intensify (im)politeness, favoring explicit expressions of impoliteness such as redress/agreement, insults, pointed criticisms/complaints, unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions over others like threats.


Corresponding author: Jean Mathieu Tsoumou, Universidad Europea de Canarias, Calle de Valentín Sanz, 27, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 38002, Spain, E-mail:

Acknowledgment

I would like thank all the participants who took part in the investigation. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers who helped better shape this paper.

  1. Conflict of interest statement: There is no conflict of interest in this study.

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Received: 2021-03-03
Accepted: 2022-01-09
Published Online: 2022-08-31
Published in Print: 2023-02-23

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 21.1.2026 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/pr-2021-0008/pdf
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