Gender Differences as Manifested in Politeness and Impoliteness Strategies in the Comments of Facebook Users on Selected News Reports

Abstract

This research aims to identify the types of politeness and impoliteness strategies adopted by both genders in a group of readers’ comments on selected American news reports posted on the CNN Facebook page on November 15th, 2022. In addition, it identifies the most frequently used politeness and impoliteness strategies by males and females. Furthermore, it investigates whether there are any differences between both genders in adopting these strategies to determine which gender is more polite/impolite on Facebook. Following both quantitative and qualitative methods, the analysis revealed that all four strategies proposed by Brown & Levinson (1987) were adopted by the commenters in the selected news reports. Moreover, the most frequently used politeness strategy in the collected data was positive politeness, followed by bald on record politeness, negative politeness and finally off record politeness. Furthermore, only four of the five strategies proposed by Culpeper (1996) were identified in the comments. The most frequently used impoliteness strategy was negative impoliteness, followed by bald on record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, and finally sarcasm politeness. The withhold politeness strategy, however, was not deployed at all by both genders in the selected data. There were also differences between genders in adopting politeness and impoliteness strategies in the selected posts as males adopted politeness as well as impoliteness strategies more than females did.