The Study Of Impoliteness In On-Line Polylogues

Impoliteness is very common in our daily life, but this kind of phenomenon does not draw much attention of linguists in a long time. They put their focus on the politeness and fully ignore the importance of the impoliteness. However, recently, more and more linguists began paying more attention to the impoliteness. As the rapid development of the Internet, the forums have become prominent as the information carrier. The language in forums has more diversity, so the study of this has much value. Recently, the researches on impoliteness and on-line polylogues are becoming more and more, but the combination of these two studies are relatively scarce.This thesis collects data from the Tianya forum as the analysis corpus and uses the theories of Brown & Levinson, Culpeper & Bousfield, Lorenzo-Dus & Mao Yansheng?s classifications of impoliteness strategies and Watts?s framework of first-order politeness and second-order politeness. The main target of this paper is to investigate impoliteness under on-line polylogal settings. This paper takes 300 postings replied to the event of child peed in Tianya forum as example. These postings are collected from April 22, 2014 to June 22, 2014. This paper aims to research the following questions:(1) How impoliteness strategies are typically realized in the corpus of Tianya forum?s postings on theevent of child peed?(2) What is the distribution of impoliteness strategies in this corpus?(3) Are there any differences between Tianya users? interpretation of impoliteness in the corpus andthat of linguistis?This thesis defines the impoliteness according to Culpepr & Bousfield, Lorenzo-Dus&MaoYansheng, Brown & Levinson?s definition. For the classification of impoliteness strategies, this thesis employes a blending classification of impoliteness strategies which fits the reasarch purpose of the present research and this classification is based on Culpper, Bousfield, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Mao Yansheng?s classifications. In this classification, the superstrategies of impoliteness are: on-record impoliteness, positive impoliteness and negative impoliteness, off-record impoliteness. The individual impoliteness strategies are: TW “Taboo words”, CON “call the other names” MOFU “make the other feel uncomfortable”, SD “seek disagreement”(positive impoliteness strategies), ANA “explicitly associate the other with the negative aspect”, PIR “put the others indebtedness on record”, BO “hinder or block the other”(negative impoliteness strategies), IP “Implicated impoliteness”, SRC “Sarcasm”(Off-record impoliteness). The research is done through the combination of quantitative and qualitative approach, as well as of first-order impoliteness and second-order impoliteness. Quantitative approach is used to investigate research question 1 and 2, i.e. the impoliteness realization and impoliteness distribution in this corpus. Qualitative approach is used to answer the third research question of this thesis, i.e. a questionnaire is employed to study the difference between the participants? assessments(first-oreder impoliteness) and the linguists? researches on impoliteness(second-order impoliteness).The results show that the impoliteness realizations have patterned and most people tend to use the positive impoliteness strategies which attack others? positive face in conflicts. In the positive impoliteness strategies, the strategies of CON “calls the other names” and TW “taboo words” are used more frequently than any other ones. Regarding the interpretation of impoliteness, the results of this paper show that there are many overlaps between the first-order approach and the second-order approach and also this finding reveals that first-order impoliteness is mainly linked to the public discourse norms which have the feature of civility.