الفهرس 
الغلافOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 169 |  |  |
| | | from | 169 | | |
Abstract
The current study examines linguistic (im)politeness behaviour and the social factors affecting such behaviour practised by interlocutors in the below-the-line comments posted on selective articles of selective Facebook news pages. In order to achieve this, the present study applies a socio-pragmatic approach; pragmatically, through employing Brown and Levinson’s (1987) theory of politeness and Culpeper’s (2011) latest model of impoliteness during the analysis process, and sociolinguistically, through examining sociological variables like the power, distance, ranking of imposition and gender variables as well as other factors such as the context, setting and personality trait in order to determine their influence on the (im)politeness behaviour of interlocutors. That is also to determine if the anonymity factor of the setting as a computer-mediated communication triggers impoliteness behaviour and if the presence of conflict and distant targets influence impoliteness. That is in addition to detecting the most prevalent (im)politeness superstrategies and formulae among interlocutors of the computer-mediated communication. The gender variable then is subjected to the Kruskal-Wallis H Test using IBM’s SPSS Statistics software to determine whether or not gender difference plays a role in adopting (im)politeness behaviour, i.e. to determine whether males are more or less polite than females. The data is collected from four news articles of four Facebook official news pages; BBC News, CNN, The New York Times, and the Daily Mail. It is comprised of below-the-line comments which are the comments posted on the said articles during the allocated period of the data (2016). The results show that sociological variables play a role in interlocutors’ (im)politeness behaviour. In addition, following the contrastive analysis of the gender difference, it is surprisingly revealed that males use impoliteness acts almost exactly as females during conflicts yet with certain differences within their choice of strategies.
Keywords: socio-pragmatics, impoliteness, politeness, sociological variables, gender, contrastive analysis, computer-mediated communication, Facebook