Investigating (Im)politeness/(In)appropriateness in Saudis’ Twitter Disagreements: A Discursive Approach

Abstract

This study explores (im)politeness/(in)appropriateness in naturally occurring disagreements in Saudis’ Twitter replies (currently known as X posts) to 12 main tweets posted about sociocultural and political topics in 6 trending hashtags between 2017-2018. The analysis of the data draws on discursive approaches to (im)politeness, particularly relational work (Locher and Watts, 2005) and rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2000). Also, the classification of disagreement strategies and the linguistic devices employed to mitigate or aggravate these disagreements were inspired by different taxonomies, including Harb (2016), Shum and Lee (2013), and Culpeper (1996; 2011a; 2016). In addition to the corpus of tweets, metalinguistic data were collected through online questionnaires. Also, follow-up interviews with 20 respondents were conducted to obtain a clearer picture of lay observers’ emic perceptions of (im)politeness, particularly in the context of Saudis’ Twitter disagreements. The main results showed that the percentage of aggravated Twitter disagreements in the corpus was higher than their mitigated and unmodified counterparts. This is likely to be due to several factors: the relative anonymity of posters on Twitter and the nature of the relationship between them, the poster’s orientation to the topic of interaction, the poster’s association/dissociation from the target, and the poster’s personality, awareness and considerations of consequences on self and others. Additionally, the analysis of metalinguistic data also revealed that classifications of (im)politeness and (in)appropriateness do not say much about how respondents evaluated Twitter disagreements in themselves. Rather, the justifications they provided gave insight into their emic views of the moral order at the societal level. The analysis suggests that the choice of categorization seems to represent an individualistic conceptualisation of (im)politeness, while the justification shows the argumentative attempt to link these classifications to the assumed shared moral order between the members of the society. Finally, the analysis presented in this study underscores the importance of integrating perspectives from (im)politeness1 and (im)politeness2 approaches, and argues that the combination of different perspectives in these two approaches can help unpack different layers of (im)politeness in social interactions.