| In recent years,with the development and popularization of the network,cyber language has attracted widespread interest,and the research into pragmatics has also extended to the field of the internet,which gradually forms a new branch of pragmatics–cyberpragmatics?Yus,2011:135?.Flamewar?online conflict?is one of the typical cyberpragmatic phenomena.In China,flamewar is called Mazhan or Mazhen,firstly emerging in the fifth chapter of Journey to the West,referring to a behavior of shouting curses before a war to provoke each other out to fight?Xia&Chen,2003:2254?.Along with the rising of the network,flamewar/Mazhan has gradually developed into a terminology specifically denoting the phenomenon of online conflict,corresponding to the face-to-face conflict.Nowadays,flamewar is becoming more and more common,and even gradually upgrades to a sort of personal attacks in real life from the verbal aggression in the network world,seriously affecting our online life and the ecological environment of languages,so the realization of“soft landing”for a flamewar is desperately needed.Even so,previous studies mainly focus on the definition,classification,and motivation of flamewar and little attention has been paid to its termination.Therefore,this thesis concentrates on the flamewar termination with more importance attached to the following three issues.?1?How are flamewars terminated in the context of Sina Weibo??2?What are the significant features of the distribution of these flamewar termination formats on Sina Weibo??3?Is there a relationship between the distribution of termination formats and the event types on Sina Weibo?In order to deal with these three questions,300 flaming episodes?1?which have come to an are collected respectively from the comment sections of five different hot events?60 pieces from each event?on Sina Weibo from October 2016 to April 2017 based on the definition of a flamewar.Firstly,the classification and selection are made to these 300 pieces of data by means of group discussion;after weeding out those not belonging to the category of flamewar and those whose termination formats cannot be determined clearly,we finally get 273 pieces of data.Then,a data analysis is conducted based on the theories of Bousfield's?2007?Impoliteness Response Framework and Vuchinich's?1990?Basic Conflict Termination Formats.Finally,the distribution frequency and the relationship between termination formats and the event types are explored by the data analysis tool SPSS 23.0.It can be found as follows.?1?On Sina Weibo,the majority of flamewars are terminated by a single format of withdrawal,third-party intervention,submission,topic shift,compromise,pleading,humor,and reasoning.And withdrawal is mainly represented as non-verbal withdrawal and verbal withdrawal;third-party intervention includes two sub-formats,interruption and suggestion;submission also includes two sub-formats,irony and apology.In addition,some combining formats are also adopted.?2?Because of the anonymity of CMC,face,right,status,and other factors are often ignored,and thus in the overall distribution of termination formats,most flamewars are terminated without resolution,namely,terminated by a format of withdrawal which tops the first.Other termination formats occur less frequently.In addition,the distribution of flamewar termination formats in each event keeps pace with the overall distribution of termination formats in five events,that is,most flamewars are terminated by the means of withdrawal,and other termination formats are rarely adopted.?3?The result of Chi-Square test indicates that there is a bit significant difference of the distribution of termination formats in different types of events.Namely,the distribution of termination formats is related to the event types on Sina Weibo.This study will help people have a deeper understanding of flamewar and its termination,which is beneficial to mitigate the online flamewars and maintain a harmonious"language ecology"?2??Kravchenko,2016:105;Huang,2016?.In addition,the explanatory power of the impoliteness theories is extended to cyberpramatics via deploying impoliteness theories to analyze flamewars.It is also hoped to supply the research into online conflict and promote the development of cyberpragmatics in China.To conclude,the online impoliteness or conflict is bound to become one of the research trends for the increasing development of the network.However,because of the author's poor research capabilities,this thesis is only a tentative study,and more research is worth conducting in the future. |
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