IMPOLITENESS IN ONLINE DISCOURSE: ANALYSIS OF READER COMMENTS ON SERBIAN NEWS SITES

Abstract

Online discourse represents an important part of human communication. When expressing
their opinions in an online environment, people are empowered to be more direct,
often without considering other people’s face. In certain situations, they may even be offensive
or impolite. The focus of this study is the manifestation of impoliteness in reader comments on
Serbian news sites. The study adopts Bousfield’s (2008) extended framework of Culpeper’s model
of impoliteness strategies (1996, 2005) in order to examine and classify different manifestations
of impoliteness. It relies on the analysis of a small specialized corpus which consists of the data
collected from reader comments on Serbian online news articles related to Novak Đoković being
denied entry into Australia in January 2022 due to the men’s number one tennis player not being
vaccinated, which was one of the most vigorously debated topics in both mass media and social
media in Serbia amid the coronavirus pandemic. The data were analyzed qualitatively. This study
reflects how Serbian language users engage in impolite communicative behavior by identifying
the most common impoliteness strategies, as well as their functions, and indicating distinctive
features of Serbian impolite online discourse.