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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 32:4 (2022) ► pp.489–517

‘So many “virologists” in this thread!’

Impoliteness in Facebook discussions of the management of the pandemic of Covid-19 in Sweden – the tension between conformity and distinction

ORCID logo | Stockholm University

This paper embarks on a functional analysis of impolite language use in discussions about the response to the pandemic of Covid-19 on the official Facebook page of the Swedish national public television broadcaster in the spring of 2020. Having combined the existing models of impoliteness (Culpeper 2016) with the Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005) in a both quantitative and qualitative investigation, the study finds remarkable differences between supporters and opponents of the Swedish tactic in terms of enactment of value orientations categorized as different attitudes within the Appraisal framework. More specifically, opponents tend to voice more subjective and affectual sentiments, whereas supporters generally derive their attitude from the Swedish institutional norms and cultural standards, resulting in more judgement. As the study concludes, these findings are related to the inherent dichotomy of the Swedish welfare state paradigm, which integrates the concepts of both state and individual citizen liability.

Keywords: impoliteness, Appraisal theory, attitude, functional analysis, social conflict, Covid-19
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Collectivism and distinction in Sweden – The source of the social conflict
  • 3.Background
    • 3.1The attitude system of appraisal
      • Affect (the domain of emotion)
      • Judgement (the domain of ethics)
      • Appreciation (the domain of aesthetics)
    • 3.2Combining impoliteness and Appraisal
    • 3.3(Im)politeness and Appraisal – Previous research
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Material
    • 4.2Coding for impoliteness and Appraisal
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Quantitative differences between supporters and opponents of the Swedish approach to the pandemic
    • 5.2The functional view on the difference between supporters and opponents of the Swedish approach to the pandemic
      • 5.2.1Judgement
      • 5.2.2Affect
      • 5.2.3Appreciation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
Published online: 8 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21014.and
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