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Part of
Approaches to Internet Pragmatics: Theory and practice
Edited by Chaoqun Xie, Francisco Yus and Hartmut Haberland
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 318] 2021
► pp. 235–256

Chapter 8
Online nicks, impoliteness, and Jewish identity in Israeli Russian conflict discourse

| University of Kansas , USA

This paper examines how online interlocutors manipulate the nickname or nick, an important form of self-presentation and identity construction online (Bechar-Israeli 1995; Aarsand 2008; Yus 2011: 43–44). Most studies of nicks focused on their taxonomy, but paid little attention to interaction. Nicks can be targeted in conflict discourse. Studying an online community of ex-Soviet migrants to Israel, I show how interlocutors discuss, modify, substitute, combine with insults, and/or translate an opponent’s nick. Such nick manipulations during conflict fall under the impoliteness strategy of using inappropriate identity markers (IIM; Culpeper 1996). By considering how nicknames are manipulated in a community with a complicated cultural history of naming, my argument reexamines how the IIM strategy relates to nick choice, nick manipulation, and identity.

Keywords: conflict discourse, impoliteness, facework, inappropriate identity markers, migration, Jewish, Israeli, Russian, identity, nicknames, online discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theorizing nicks, identity, and personal names in a migrant community
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Data and analysis
    • 4.1Thread: Zeev
    • 4.2Translating the Hebrew nick into Russian
    • 4.3Russian versus Hebrew names
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.318.08per
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Andersson, Marta
2023. E-mpoliteness – creative impoliteness as an expression of digital social capital. Journal of Politeness Research 0:0 DOI logo
Xie, Chaoqun & Weina Fan
2024. Theorizing impoliteness: a Levinasian perspective. Journal of Politeness Research 20:1 ► pp. 157 ff. DOI logo

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