Pragmatic Analysis of Impoliteness in the Context of Online Business

Abstract

Impoliteness is an important research issue in pragmatics. The popularity and development of computer-mediated communication (CMC) or internet-mediated communication (IMC) makes the impoliteness phenomena in the online context play an increasingly important role in the pragmatic studies. However, the previous pragmatic studies on impoliteness phenomena mainly focus on traditional issues, and there is still a large room for research on impoliteness phenomena in the context of online business. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the adoption of impoliteness strategies by subjects of commercial activities in the context of online business and its characteristics, in order to provide a new way for the contemporary study of impoliteness phenomena. Using the dialogue between merchants and consumers on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao as linguistic data and adopting the qualitative analysis method, this paper analyzes the selection of impoliteness strategies and its characteristics in online business context based on Culpeper and Bousfield’s theories of impoliteness. It was found that the choice of impoliteness strategies in online business contexts is diverse, including direct impoliteness, positive impoliteness (negation of the other party and intentional non-cooperation; insults), negative impoliteness (threats), mock politeness, and interruption/avoidance; in addition, speakers also adopt non-verbal impoliteness strategies, such as repeated use of punctuation marks and emojis, with the former predominating with punctuation marks that express strong emotions, such as exclamation marks. Based on the analysis of linguistic data above, this paper proposes that there emerge three obvious characteristics of impoliteness in online business contexts: the asynchronous nature of time and space exacerbates impoliteness; the virtual nature of tone reinforces impoliteness; and the conversational subjects tend to use multiple impoliteness strategies, including the repeated use of the same impoliteness strategy and the combination of multiple impoliteness strategies. This study sheds new light on the study of impoliteness in online contexts, enriches the study of impoliteness phenomena and further promotes the development of internet pragmatics.