A Pragmatic Study Of Advice-giving In An Online Forum

This study explores the online advice-giving in computer-mediatedcommunication. A qualitative study is carried out on the basis of data from a Chineseforum, attempting to answer two research questions:(1) What are the generallinguistic patterns of online advice-giving?(2) Why are different online advice-givingpatterns employed?Firstly, the online advice-giving in this study is defined as any response commentswhich are made by a forum participant to advocate the advice-seeker to perform afuture action to solve a particular problem with the purpose of benefiting theadvice-seeker in achieving some desirable goal. In online advice-giving, to avoidbeing regarded boorish and build harmonious social relationships, advisor wouldborrow linguistic strategies from face-to-face interactions or design his owninnovative strategies to perform this speech act politely. Based on a comprehensiveanalysis, we classify advice into two categories: direct advice and indirect advice.However, the online advice does not only contain advice messages and different typesof politeness strategies are identified to frame this speech act. Then based on Brownand Levinson‘s framework, positive politeness strategies including showing concernwhich specially includes giving direct advice, giving information, offering additionalhelp and inquiring the advice-seeker, providing reasons, sharing similar experience,using addressing terms and encouraging expressions, shifting the focus and seekingagreement, and negative politeness strategy including using hedges are employed togive advice politely. Besides, statistical results show that positive politeness strategiesare used more frequently than negative politeness strategies and among the positivepoliteness strategies used, the three most frequently occurring strategies are showingconcern, providing reasons and sharing similar experience.Secondly, the study explores the pragmatic functions of using politenessstrategies in online advising. Influenced by the contextual factors of the asynchronousfeature and the purpose of the forum, the pragmatic functions identified are to weaken the face-threatening degree of advice-giving to avoid causing offense, to shorten thedistance so as to create a caring atmosphere and to make advice acceptable foradvice-seekers.This study is expected to give a comprehensive account of advice-giving in anonline forum. Meanwhile, by looking at politeness displayed in advising, the studyprovides further empirical evidence for politeness research.