A Comparative Study Of Impoliteness Strategies Of Speech Acts In Chinese And English Social Media Communication

Although impoliteness in language use is sometimes neglected and considered less important to interpersonal interaction,the phenomenon has attracted increasing attention from researchers both at home and abroad.Over the years,many researchers have shed light on "politeness" in language use to understand and explain communication,while studies on "impoliteness" have been insufficient.There are many empirical studies that began to apply relevant theories in various language politeness and impoliteness contexts.Computer-mediated communication(CMC),for example,becomes an ideal source for impoliteness research data in that natural impoliteness phenomena tend to occur more often in CMC than in face-to-face interactions.In a word,there is still a vast blank in impoliteness research in general and related pragmatic issues investigated in previous research are limited.To be exact,impoliteness research in the CMC context focusing on Chinese is still rare.Furthermore,comparative "impoliteness" studies across languages are sure to bring out important discoveries.This research makes an attempt to explore impoliteness by investigating strategies of impolite speech acts in the Chinese and in the English online social medias(Weibo and Twiter).The research adopts Culpeper's(2015)impoliteness model and Herring's(2007)faceted classification scheme and focuses on computer-mediated communication in a complete systemic theoretical framework to answer three research questions:(1)what impoliteness strategies do the interlocutors of social medias use to express their impoliteness beliefs and attitudes?(2)Are there distinctions of the uses of impoliteness strategies between Chinese and English online interactions? If there are,what are their respective features?(3)What are the possible causes for the above similarities and/or distinctions?By using both quantitative and qualitative methods and based on analyzing the results both inductively and deductively,the researcher finds that interlocutors of both Chinese and English use the same categories of strategies in a similar context.On the other hand,the distinctions of the use of impoliteness strategies between Chinese and English data lie in the use of positive impoliteness strategies.The similarities found in Chinese and English data proved that there are some universalities of Culpeper's(2015)impoliteness model that makes it applicable across languages and the impoliteness strategies people choose to use are context dependent.With regard to the causes for the distinctions found in the analysis of the data,the distinctions may be connected to the choices of the participants,the differences between the two languages and the differences between the two medias(Weibo and Twitter).In a word,the innovative findings of the research contribute significantly to more and new comprehension of the impoliteness theories,the impoliteness phenomenon and the feature of the language of CMC.The findings of this research also shed light on related pragmatics research,cross-cultural communication and multi-media communication research.What's more,the practice of online instructing,reading and translation and language acquisition can also benefit greatly from this research.