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Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 15:4 (2024) ► pp.557–583

Criticizing for the public interest and aligning with others

How Jordanians constructed their online criticisms of lockdown breaches during the COVID-19 pandemic

ORCID logo | Jordan University of Science and Technology,
| Jordan University of Science and Technology,
This study examines the speech act of criticizing in online comments on the COVID-19 lockdown breaches in Jordan in 2020. Drawing on speech act theory and the face-saving perspective of politeness, the study investigates the strategies used to criticize these breaches. The analysis of 356 online comments revealed that Jordanians used ten strategies to criticize these lockdown breaches: Insulting, Appealing to the divine, Intertextuality, Rhetorical questions, Stylized threats, Framing criticism as request, Framing criticism as advice-giving, Framing criticism as warning, Invoking legal authority, and Invoking religious ‘haram’. These criticisms were driven by safeguarding the collective interests of community members rather than merely expressing personal condemnation of the breaches. The breaches were constructed in these criticisms as communally reproachable, legally answerable, and religiously proscribed. Given their public nature, these criticisms appear to be motivated not by politeness but by expressing strong emotions, showing in-group solidarity, and aligning with other community members.
Keywords: criticizing, speech acts, face, politeness, fatalism, cultural situatedness
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Insulting
    • 4.2Appealing to the divine
    • 4.3Criticizing through intertextuality
    • 4.4Asking rhetorical questions
    • 4.5Stylized threats
    • 4.6Framing criticism as request
    • 4.7Framing criticism as advice-giving
    • 4.8Framing criticism as warning
    • 4.9Criticizing through invoking legal authority
    • 4.10Invoking religious ‘haram’
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 12 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.22089.bad
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