Publication details
Complimenting as a rapport-building positive politeness strategy in online communities
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Over the past 25 years, the Internet has become a global communication network connecting millions of users, who form myriad online communities. The paper intends to explain how members of asynchronous online communities, discussion boards, cooperate by means of complimenting, which is a powerful positive politeness strategy used to express mutuality and claim common ground. Compliments have a primarily social function creating and/or enhancing solidarity and rapport; they are even referred to as “social lubricants”. The communities under examination discuss women’s” topics, such as dieting, infertility, pregnancy and mothering. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of a self -compiled corpus consisting of several discussion threads on these topics has shown that complimenting is one of the most frequent strategies applied by interlocutors. It has also revealed distinct semantic and syntactic patterns, as compliments are highly formulaic and rather poor in their linguistic realizations. Further on, attention will be paid to the context of compliments to find out whether the fact that Internet users communicate merely via text will be of significance here. Traditionally, women are said to compliment on appearance, whereas men on performance or possessions. The last part of the presentation will touch upon responses to compliments, representing the second part of an adjacency pair, again in comparison with face -to-face communication. Contrary to compliments, responses to them represent a severe face-threat and are related to negative politeness. |