A Pragmatic Analysis Of Impoliteness Strategies In Comments And Replies From Hot Topic Of Sina Weibo

Politeness is an indispensable element of social stability,and the study of politeness has become an inevitable work.The researches on politeness in foreign countries begin earlier than China.Brown and Levinson(1978/1987)propose the politeness principles.Since then,researches on politeness principles have flourished and become the focus in the field of linguistics and social-linguistics.Among them,the most famous ones are Leech' s Politeness Principle and Brown and Levinson' s Face-Saving Theory.However,natural language includes not only polite speech,but also impolite speech.With the development of society,impolite speech occurs increasingly,which to some extent,causes interpersonal conflicts and affects social stability.Therefore,the impoliteness phenomena draw attentions of many scholars and the corresponding impoliteness principles are proposed,based on impoliteness principles,among which the most influential two are Culpeper' s(1996,2003)and Bousfield' s(2008)impoliteness strategies.Besides,Bousfield proposes and modifies the impoliteness strategies based on Culpeper' s.What is more,these two scholars' impoliteness strategies provide strong theoretical support for the analysis of impolite speech.This paper takes Bousfield' s(2008)impoliteness strategy as the theoretical framework and comments and replies from hot topic of Sina Weibo as the corpus to analyze the realization and the causes of impoliteness phenomenon through qualitative analysis.Besides this study explores the possibilities of whether these strategies apply to written language.As for the pragmatic function,the Culpeper' s(2011)two impoliteness pragmatic functions are manly adopted.The major findings of this paper are presented as follows: 1)Among twenty impoliteness strategies Boufield proposed,only thirteen strategies are realized in the corpus.2)In addition,four new impoliteness strategies are found in corpus: Talking about one' s weakness,Mentioning the other' s relatives,especially elder female,Acronym,and Emoticons.3)The main causes of impoliteness found in this paper are:the imbalance of power,personal emotions,interest conflict between participants,and the features of Internet.4)As for pragmatic functions,affective function and institutional function are presented in this thesis.All in all,this research enriches the impoliteness theory and further broadens the scope of impoliteness data analysis.Secondly,in the era of the prevalence of the Internet,the phenomenon of cyber-violence emerge in an endless stream,to a certainextent,it will have an impact on the young generation,therefore,it is extremely urgent to strictly regulate Internet language,this study helps people to have a deeper understanding of impoliteness speeches in Sina Weibo,rouses the public's awareness of cyber-violence and appeal for the public to decrease cyber-violence.It also helps the public to strengthen the understanding of impoliteness language and make reflection on this phenomenon,then provides references for regulating the Internet language.