| Impoliteness has become more and more ubiquitous in daily communication.Thus it is no longer a marginal linguistic phenomenon.Impoliteness,especially in the cyber world,is even more salient due to the anonymity feature of online communication.Nowadays,the research of impoliteness has not extended very deeply into business area,thus the research findings pertaining to this filed are rare.With the growing popularity of online shopping,more and more people start buying stuff online.However,if people encounter bad purchasing experience,then it is very possible for them to leave impolite negative online consumer reviews.Such negative online consumer reviews would greatly influence brand reputation of online sellers and purchasing intention of potential consumers.Hence this thesis intends to approach impoliteness phenomenon in negative online consumer reviews from the perspective of impoliteness strategy.By combining quantitative and qualitative research methods,this research mainly explores three questions:(1)How many types of impoliteness strategies can be found in negative online consumer reviews?(2)From the perspective of rapport management,how is impoliteness realized through impoliteness strategies identified in negative online consumer reviews?(3)What are the pragmatic functions of impoliteness strategies found in negative online consumer reviews? To answer the above research questions,700 pieces of online negative consumer reviews are collected on Amazon shopping website.And through the process of coding and decoding and the combination of contexts,the data are analysed.The research results found 12 types of impoliteness strategies in negative OCRs.More specifically,there are 10 types of impoliteness strategies that belong to the on-record impoliteness super strategy and 2 types of impoliteness strategies under off-record impoliteness super strategy in the data.On-record impoliteness strategies include excluding the other from the activity(EOA),disassociating from the other(DFO),seeking disagreement(SD),taboo words(TW),calling the other names(CON),frightening(FR),condescending,scorning or ridiculing(CSR),explicitly associating the other with a negative aspect(ANA),criticising(CR),challenges(CL).Off-record impoliteness strategies incorporate implicated impoliteness(IP)and sarcasm(SRC).As for the impoliteness realisation,consumers would blame poor products’ quality,logistics,services,after-sale services etc.on the online sellers to damage the quality face of the sellers to realise impoliteness.By attacking the sellers’ social role,questioning their stance,rights and obligations,consumers damage their social identity face to achieve impoliteness.And consumers can damage online sellers’ equity rights through treating online sellers unfairly and imposing on them to cause offence.Besides,impoliteness can also be achieved through damaging association rights of the online sellers in terms of the construction of cooperative relationship with consumers.What is more,three major functions of impoliteness strategies are identified in Amazon negative OCRs.By applying impoliteness achieved through impoliteness strategies,consumers can vent negative feelings,to gain and exert power,and achieve entertaining functions and create humour.Implicated impoliteness strategy(IP)pertaining to consumers’ expression of disappointment,annoyance and taboo words(TW)used in negative OCRs can blatantly vent negative emotions.The second functions can be achieved through impoliteness strategies like CSR,FR and EOA.For instance,consumers would condescend the products of the sellers to show their high social status in cyber world to gain power and appear superior,and frighten the sellers or exclude the sellers from the selling activity to restrict their free business operation to gain the power of interfering the sellers’ action.In addition,consumers would utilize metaphors in implicated impoliteness strategy(IP)to indirectly criticise product quality,such language creativity brings other consumers pleasure and let other consumers echo with and feel sympathy for the consumer,thus achieving entertaining function.This thesis to some extent makes modest contribution to impoliteness research in terms of impoliteness strategy in online business setting.It provides some references for impoliteness strategy identification in online business context as well.What is more,this research explores pragmatic functions of impoliteness strategies in negative online consumer reviews,which extends impoliteness research in social pragmatics field.The impolite utterances in negative OCRs can reflect some problems in terms of the management of online shops,hence this research can serve as a reminder for online sellers and companies to improve their products and services and hopes it can shed some lights on the management of negative consumer reviews for online shop sellers. |
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