Abstract
Interactional positioning has to do with how people express their attitudes and dispositions to others (stance) and signal how they wish to relate with other participants in the discourse (engagement). These are closely connected with the extent to which impoliteness is expressed in discourse and the resources and strategies employed. This study investigates interactional positioning and impoliteness in two Nigerian political discussion sites, Nairaland Forum and Gistmania. The findings show that bald-on-record and negative impoliteness were predominant in the discussions. The common linguistic expressions of impoliteness were name-calling, vulgarism, cursing, dismissal and sarcasm. Participants also used questions, directives and reader pronouns you and your for face attacks and heightening of the effect of impolite expressions. Self-mentions and attitude markers, especially cognitive verbs, were used to convey feelings and attitudes towards other participants within and outside the discussion. The study concludes that impoliteness thrives in political debates online because of the uninhibited context, which gives freedom to participants to deliberately inject invective language in order to set the emotional temperature in the discussion and cause disaffection among the participants and the group they represent.
Highlights
Politeness and interpersonal positioning in discourse are two closely inter-related concepts
While interpersonal positioning has to do with the expression of personalities, and cognitive states in an ongoing discourse (Biber/Finegan 1989; Oyinlade/Taiwo 2018), linguistic politeness refers to the use of appropriate linguistic expressions in order to maintain interactants’ face in communication
This study looks at politeness and interactional positioning in Nigerian online political discourse
Summary
Politeness and interpersonal positioning in discourse are two closely inter-related concepts. While interpersonal positioning has to do with the expression of personalities, and cognitive states in an ongoing discourse (Biber/Finegan 1989; Oyinlade/Taiwo 2018), linguistic politeness refers to the use of appropriate linguistic expressions in order to maintain interactants’ face in communication. Interpersonal positioning can be construed as the conveyance of textual voices (stance) and the presupposition of the active role of the addressees (engagement) (Hyland 2005). The resources employed by discourse participants to express their positions and connect to the readers can sometimes be indicative of the extent to which they signal politeness in discourse. In any form of interactional discourse, such as online debates, interactants employ different linguistic means to indicate their awareness of the face or the public self-image, the persona of other participants (Myers 2010).
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