“I know what you mean”: Agreeing as a positive politeness strategy in online discussions
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The present paper deals with the speech event of expressing agreement, a prominent positive politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson 1978, Leech 1983), via which the users of online communities promote solidarity in their forums. As opposed to agreeing in face-to-face conversation, where it is often not voiced and tends to be expressed via paralanguage or even silence, different means must be employed in computer-mediated discourse with its absent visual channel and different concept of back-channelling. The contribution aims to demonstrate the findings from an analysis conducted on a corpus comprising several threads of discussion forums dedicated to common topics discussed in online communities, mostly consisting of women users, such as dieting, infertility, pregnancy or parenting. It presents the structure of agreement, in particular how it is linked to previous discourse (especially by means of quoting and naming), and its most recurrent patterns. Contrary to the general belief that agreement is unmarked and preferred response and hence not necessarily expressed, it was a frequent strategy in the corpus. As it occurred even in situations when the speaker was not expected to agree (unsolicited agreement), it is clear that the users expresses constant agreement and emphasise sameness even without being encouraged to do so in order to stress common ground and overcome face-threatening acts caused by the delicate nature of the topics. |