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Evaluation in Context
Edited by Geoff Thompson † and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 242] 2014
► pp. 387–412

Evaluative discourse and politeness in university students' communication through social networking sites

This chapter explores evaluative discourse on social networking sites (henceforth SNSs), paying special attention to the role played by the expression of attitude and positive politeness in the management of interpersonal rapport. The corpus for the study consists of a random sample of 100 messages exchanged among university students in the United Kingdom and the United States on a particular site, i.e., Facebook, during the two-year period 2010–2012. Analysis is approached from the theories of appraisal (Martin and White 2005; Bednarek 2008) and politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987); and the methodology for processing the data borrows quantitative techniques from Corpus Linguistics. The findings indicate that specific contextual features of SNSs seem to trigger the production of attitudinal meanings of affect, judgement and appreciation, which are exploited for the relational work involved in the construction and maintenance of positive face.

Published online: 4 February 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.242.19san
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Alba-Juez, Laura
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Andersson, Marta
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Fuoli, Matteo & Charlotte Hommerberg
2015. Optimising transparency, reliability and replicability: annotation principles and inter-coder agreement in the quantification of evaluative expressions. Corpora 10:3 ► pp. 315 ff. DOI logo
Graham, Sage L. & Claire Hardaker
2017. (Im)politeness in Digital Communication. In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ► pp. 785 ff. DOI logo
Põldvere, Nele, Matteo Fuoli & Carita Paradis
2016. A study of dialogic expansion and contraction in spoken discourse using corpus and experimental techniques. Corpora 11:2 ► pp. 191 ff. DOI logo
Santamaría-García, Carmen
2015. Review of Gil-Salom & Soler-Monreal (2014): Dialogicity in written specialised genres. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 28:2 ► pp. 647 ff. DOI logo
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2016. Connected Parents: Combining Online and Off-Line Parenthood in Vlogs and Blogs. In Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2016 [Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 27 ff. DOI logo
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2017. Emotional and Educational Consequences of (Im)politeness in Teacher–Student Interaction at Higher Education. Corpus Pragmatics 1:3 ► pp. 233 ff. DOI logo

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