Politesse et impolitesse dans les médias sociaux en situation de crise du Covid-19 : Analyse d’un corpus d’interactions entre internautes et membres du Conseil fédéral suisse

English title:
Politeness and impoliteness in social media during the Covid-19 crisis:
Analysis of a corpus of interactions between Internet users and members of the Swiss Federal Council

Baptiste Bersier is PhD student in French linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland. His research focuses on the study of speech acts, more specifically on the use of criticisms in discourse. He is more generally interested in the role of face-management in language production and comprehension and the way it leads to inter-individual differences.

Abstract

In this talk, I am going to focus on a study which aims at analyzing the interactions between Internet users and members of the Swiss Federal Council on the social media Twitter and Facebook during the Covid-19 crisis. In conducting this empirical exploration, the goal is to address the notions of second order politeness and impoliteness (Locher and Watts, 2005) in naturalistic data, adopting a contrastive view by comparing two of the national languages: French and German. To do this, I focus exclusively on the marks of politeness and impoliteness that were found in the responses of Internet users in reaction to the messages of two members of the Federal Council: Alain Berset and Simonetta Sommaruga. Results show that internet users express in our data more frequently impoliteness marks (Face-Threatening acts) than politeness marks (Face Flattering acts). More specifically, the act of criticism is the most used impoliteness marker while the act of thanking is the most employed politeness marker. In addition, our data show that the responses of users do not significantly differ between French and German in terms of the frequency of (im)politeness marks and modulating strategies. At a more fine-grained level of analysis, the corpus demonstrates that the vast majority of these (im)politeness markers are surrounded by modulating strategies, users either softening or strengthening their utterances. From a qualitative perspective, these strategies are at the chore of our analysis and allow to illustrate how crucial they are, when interpreting the meaning of a given utterance. Following this view, we also demonstrate some occurrences where these strategies constitute a challenge for the annotation process and the conveyed meaning.