Promoting solidarity in an online community via positive face enhancement of its members
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Contrary to the primary fears expressed by the general public as well as the first researchers of Internet communication, in unison claiming that the arrival of the Internet would harm interpersonal relationships and eventually put an end to human communication as such, over the past twenty-five years, we have seen the Internet becoming a common ground fulfilling the social function in the same way as other means of communication before and perhaps even more. Similarly to face-to-face communication, the Internet offers billions of its users a safe place where they can have very intimate conversations, despite the often large spatio-temporal distance between them. The theoretical point of departure for the analysis are two prominent theories dealing with pragmatic politeness, namely Brown and Levinson’s (1978) positive politeness and Leech’s (1983, 2014) maxims.In particular, the present paper aims to show how members of an online community boost each other’s positive face in order to promote mutuality and solidarity of their online community. An analysis of a self-compiled corpus built of several message board threads dealing with the so-called women’s topics (e.g. dieting, infertility, pregnancy and mothering) has revealed that the members mainly use the following speech acts, or better to say speech events: complimenting, agreeing, congratulating, commiserating, well-wishing and claiming in-group membership. In the presentation, the author will illustrate these events on examples from the corpus and explain how they function to promote solidarity and overcome the face threat caused by the delicate topics by attending to the positive face of the hearer. |