A Pragmatic Study Of Impoliteness In Seller-Customer Online Interactions On E-bay

As a hot topic in pragmatics,politeness has shifted from the study of principles and strategies of politeness to the study of impoliteness strategies and developed from linguistic politeness and interpersonal politeness to co-constructed politeness from the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics(Ran & Liu,2020).The interactions between sellers and consumers on online shopping platforms have become an integral part of people’s daily lives.However,the anonymity of online communication has contributed to impoliteness.Based on the previous studies of impoliteness,previous researchers have made greater contributions to the development of impoliteness,but have drawn less attention to the study of impoliteness in the online context,and the seller-consumer online interactions have not been thoroughly studied.Most of these studies pay attention to the study of impoliteness strategies or impoliteness response strategies rather than their integrations.This thesis is an integration of impoliteness strategies and its response strategies,and impoliteness functions and factors by the reference of dynamic impoliteness at discoursal level proposed by Bousfield.The model is the integrated model of dynamic impoliteness(IMDI).On the basis of IMDI,this thesis intends to answer the following questions:(1)What impoliteness strategies are employed in consumers’ negative reviews?(2)What impoliteness response strategies are used in sellers’ negative responses?What are the impoliteness features of such response strategies?(3)What impoliteness functions are achieved in sellers’ negative responses?What are the pragmatic factors for the use of those negative responses?In order to answer the above research questions,the author screens online consumers’ negative reviews and sellers’ negative responses on the e-Bay shopping website of the past one year,from September 2021 to September 2022,and collects500 items in total.Furthermore,through the data classification and detailed analysis of impoliteness based on IMDI with a combination of contexts,the study draws the following conclusions:(1)The employment of impoliteness strategies in CNRs(consumers’ negative reviews)are on-record and off-record impoliteness strategies,the latter including sarcasm and implicational impoliteness.Overall,on-record impoliteness strategies are the most frequently used in CNRs,followed by implicational impoliteness and sarcasm.(2)As for the three sorts of impoliteness response strategies used in SNRs(sellers’ negative responses),sellers are inclined to use defensive response strategies most,and then defensive-offensive pairs and offensive response strategies.Impoliteness features can be displayed in response strategies.There are six sub-strategies within defensive response strategies.They are “abrogation”“dismissing” “ignoring the face attack” “offering an account” “pleading” and“excuse” as a new sub-strategy in SNRs on e-Bay.Moreover,offensive responses include four sub-strategies: “opt-out” “insults” “scorn or ridiculing” and“disassociate from the other”.The latter three are newly found sub-strategies in SNRs on e-Bay.Another new sub-strategy is “condescending” found in defensive-offensive pairs.(3)Sellers perform four functions: affective,coercive,entertaining,and advisory functions.Advisory function is a new one discovered in SNRs on e-Bay.And there are two major pragmatic factors among others,i.e.Linguistic-pragmatic and contextual factors.The linguistic-pragmatic factors include conventionalized impoliteness triggers used in consumers’ negative reviews and the conversational maxims flouted by sellers and consumers.The contextual factors contain the face wants of sellers and consumers and features of online communication concerning the single forms and the anonymity of online communication.At the theoretical level,this thesis constructs an integrated model of dynamic impoliteness(IMDI),which renders a new avenue for studies of dynamic impoliteness and impoliteness theory.It also promotes the study of impoliteness factors in the seller-consumer online interactions from the linguistic view.At the practical level,this study focuses on the dynamic impoliteness and the final purpose is to help minimize the impoliteness acts or reduce the impolite expressions used in the online context.To some degree,the research conclusions are beneficial to maintain interpersonal harmony in online communication,which might also boost the development of interpersonal pragmatics.