STRATEGIES OF UNPOLITENESS AND RUDENESS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Social networks have become a space in which communicative practices arising from face-to-face interactions have been transferred. The article analyses a selection of comments on the same news item published on two social networks popular in Spain, Facebook and X. The article attempts to understand how impoliteness, rudeness and discursive violence manifest themselves in this specific type of interaction. The analysis is based on Culpepper’s theory of impolite speech acts. Methodologically, the researcher follows the recommendations of discourse pragmatics to analyse utterances and corpus linguistics to deal with the data extracted from these digital sources. As a conclusion, the author notes the extensive use of impoliteness and even rudeness in both social networks. If the discursive categories of blatant and negative rudeness are added, they reach 70.66% of the corpus in Facebook and 60.66% in Twitter, with the addition that the discourse is much more offensive in Facebook. As for impolite speech acts, it is concluded that the most frequent are those in which insults and sarcasm are used as a means of damaging the interlocutor’s image.