Impoliteness in computer mediated communication

Abstract

In this study, the nature of linguistic (im)politeness is examined in Turkish Computer Mediated Communication (henceforth CMC) based on data collected at an internet discussion forum. The aim of my study is to investigate the features and functions of impolite utterances within an interactional framework. In the study, impoliteness has been defined as being the opposite of politeness, in that, rather than seeking to mitigate Face Threatening Act (FTA), it constitutes the issuing of intentionally conflictive verbal FTA. The data are collected from a forum conversation in which users post and reply to other postings, articles and news. Accordingly, the type of CMC here is asynchronous and textbased as opposed to other modalities such as instant messaging or video chat. I selected the corpus from one thread of topic in which 19 members participate in the discussion of the headscarf issue in 134 posts. In these posts, 193 impolite speech acts are identified and analyzed. The impoliteness models offered by Culpeper (1996) and Bousfield (2007) based on face-toface conversation are applied to the data. The results indicate that impoliteness in Turkish CMC present a different picture than that of face-to-face conversation in English in terms of both impoliteness strategies and the dynamics of impoliteness: 1) The impoliteness strategies used to attack the positive face of the hearer significantly outnumbers the negative impoliteness strategies. Furthermore, impoliteness is by definition on-record. 2) The most common strategy in the data is challenging through rhetorical questions. However, we should also note that impoliteness strategies are not used individually; instead a combination of different impoliteness strategies seems to be the norm in the data. 3) In a similar way, impoliteness is recursive. In other words, one impolite speech act triggers more impoliteness in response. One way of avoiding this would be to use defense strategies. However this is not found in the data. Moreover in impolite sequences in face-to-face interaction, the sequences typically come to an end with a resolution. However in our data, of the nine conflict threads, only two come to a resolution point. In conclusion, it is difficult to claim that CMC is more or less polite than face to face interaction because it is the accepted norms of the community, but not the medium of interaction that determines the politeness of behavior.