Negation as a means of face management in online discussions
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The paper is based on a survey examining negation in synchronous (real-time) chat represented by a corpus compiled from various online chat services. Negation and the use of negatives is observed from the pragmatic point of view based on Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory (1978) and Leech’s Politeness Principle (1983, 2014). Negation can pose a risk regarding the fellow participants’ faces if it entails expressing disagreement, rejection or refusal. The paper analyses negation when performing face-threatening acts (FTAs) and the degree to what the participants feel the need mitigate the FTAs by means of various hedging devices. Two opposing tendencies are motivating the behaviour of the chat participants: the in-group solidarity which leads to the observance of the politeness guidelines, and the anonymity of the online environment which may result in ignoring politeness conventions. |
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