Exploring Linguistic Impoliteness in CMC: An Analysis of the Users' Construction of Impoliteness towards Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris in YouTube Comments

Abstract

Impoliteness is an extremely rich phenomenon embedded in human interaction that may be realized through different channels of communication: speech, gestures, prosodic features, silence, turn-taking, among others. Nowadays, there are numerous ways of understanding impoliteness and what it entails, for it has been studied by various disciplines such as linguistics, history, pragmatics and literary studies. Following Bousfield's definition, impoliteness can be understood as the construction of "gratuitous and conflictive verbal face-threatening acts which are purposefully delivered" (2008: 72). Similar to this, Culpeper (2011) understands impoliteness as the offensive behavior whose objective is to damage a person's identity. As mentioned before, there is not a single definition of impoliteness, for it is a complex phenomenon that has been under constant investigation. It is interesting to add that, during the emergence of the first politeness theories, impoliteness was not regarded as a field of studies on its own. Instead, it was merely examined within the politeness theories, precisely as their negative counterpart. According to Mills, "[p]oliteness is the expression of the speakers' intention to mitigate face threats carried by certain face threatening acts toward the listener" (2003: 6). Interestingly, there is an imbalance between the amount of research dedicated to politeness and impoliteness. Contrary to the study of impoliteness, the politeness phenomenon has been deeply explored across time by various scholars such as Lakoff (1973 and 1989) Leech (1983 and 2014), Brown and Levinson (1987) and Spencer-Oatey (2002 and 2008), among others. It was around the mid-1990s that impoliteness began to be examined as an object of study on its own. In fact, even if the amount of research on it is still scarce in comparison to that of politeness, impoliteness has become one of the most prominent areas of research in the 21st Century according to Sinkeviciute (2015). The reason behind this shift towards the exploration of impoliteness as an area of study separately from politeness can be attributed to the fact that communication is not only based on harmonious exchanges, but also on those instances where participants present impolite behavior, both verbally or non-verbally, towards the addressee. Culpeper explains the need to explore impoliteness by stating that "impoliteness is an important aspect of social life" (2011: 15). Therefore, considering that real human communication is built through both polite and impolite exchanges, this disruption of harmony in discourse should also be brought into the picture instead of being overlooked, for it adds significant value to the study of human interaction. Impoliteness research has been developed within different contexts varying from face-to-face exchanges to digital communication. The massive growth, development and adoption of technology and digital practices around the world has brought along the emergence of a new type of discourse embedded in this digital environment known as computer mediated communication

2 (CMC). According to Chaka, "CMC is a term referring to communication that occurs between human beings through computer networks. In this sense, it is a combination of telecommunication technologies and computer networks. The latter can be local or global networks" (2010: 628). The study of impoliteness and language use in digital environments has become a rich area for linguistic research in view of CMC's essential role in today's human communication, but especially due to the differences between digital and face-to-face interaction, such as participation structure, audience types, paralinguistic cues, and presence of multimodality (e.g. language, images, music, among others).