Impoliteness Strategies in Facebook Comments on Ministry of Health’s Declarations and Posts on Covid-19

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the impoliteness strategies employed by Facebookers commenting on declarations of the Jordanian Minister of Health about Covid-19. It also aims to examine the socio-cultural considerations behind the use of impoliteness strategies. To this end, the researchers adopted Culpeper’s model (2011) of impoliteness as a theoretical framework. The data of the current study were collected from the official Facebook page of the Ministry of Health. The data included 400 comments (14253 tokens). The findings revealed that Facebookers used seven of Culpeper’s 2011 conventionalized impoliteness strategies, namely insults, challenging or unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions, pointed criticism, dismissals, silencers, negative expressions/bad wishes, and condescension. Moreover, the findings showed that the most frequent impoliteness strategy used by Facebookers was challenging or unpalatable questions. In addition, the study revealed that due to some sociocultural and political considerations, certain impoliteness strategies such as enforcing messages and threats were not employed.

Keywords: Impoliteness; Media Discourse; COVID-19, Culpeper Impoliteness Model.