On-line polylogues and impoliteness: The case of postings sent in response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube video Nuria Lorenzo-Dus a, *, Pilar Garce ´ s-Conejos Blitvich b,1 , Patricia Bou-Franch c,2 a Department of English Language and Literature, Swansea University, Swansea, SA2 0TX, South Wales, United Kingdom b Department of English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd., Charlotte, NC 28223, United States c Departamento de Filologı´a Inglesa y Alemana, Universidad de Valencia, Avenida Blasco Iban ˜ez 32, 46010 – Valencia, Spain 1. Introduction Over 40 years ago, Sacks (1992) called for research into polylogal (multi-participant) conversations, which he regarded as potentially ‘‘much more interesting’’ (1992: 523) than their ‘‘much blander’’ (1992: 533) dyadic counterparts. Sacks’ call was taken up with considerably less vigour in linguistics than in disciplines such as communication studies (cf. e.g. Cragan and Wright’s (1980)) critical review of circa one hundred published studies on communication in small groups in the 1970s). A notable exception in linguistics was a collection of articles on polylogues in a 2004 special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics. Herein, the inherent complexity and flexibility of polylogues was fully embraced. 3 In the words of the editor of this special issue, ‘‘how can one resist [Sacks’] urge to take on this challenge [to study polylogues]?’’ (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2004: 21). One cannot, would be our answer, particularly given the comparative dearth of studies of polylogues in computer-mediated communication (CMC) settings. Research on the latter, moreover, has experienced significant growth of late, but impoliteness phenomena therein remain largely unexplored vis-a ` -vis politeness ones (Haugh, 2010; but see section 3). Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2578–2593 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 21 August 2009 Received in revised form 27 January 2011 Accepted 6 March 2011 Available online 3 April 2011 Keywords: On-line polylogues Impoliteness realisation Impoliteness interpretation YouTube ABSTRACT The overall aim of this paper is to investigate impoliteness in a particular on-line polylogal setting – YouTube postings (c. 13,000 words) triggered by the ‘Obama Reggaeton’ video, which was released during the 2008 US democratic primaries. This is done through integration of quantitative/qualitative analytic tools and of (im)politeness1 and (im) politeness 2 approaches. A two-prong experimental study is used in order to examine impoliteness realisation and interpretation in the corpus. Findings reveal clear patterns in the realisation of impoliteness strategies, including a preference for on-record impoliteness saliently oriented towards attacking the positive face needs of one’s on- line co-participants. In this respect, findings also call for a refinement of existing taxonomies of impoliteness. Regarding the interpretation of impoliteness, the analysis reveals considerable overlap between ‘lay’ (impoliteness1) and ‘analyst’ (impoliteness2) assessments. The former, in addition, are found to relate principally to norms of public discourse associated with civility. ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 0 1792 602540; fax: +44 0 1792 602545. E-mail addresses: n.lorenzo-dus@swansea.ac.uk (N. Lorenzo-Dus), pgblitvi@uncc.edu (P. Garce ´ s-Conejos Blitvich), patricia.bou@uv.es (P. Bou-Franch). 1 Tel.: +1 704 687 2126; fax: +1 704 687 3961. 2 Tel.: +34 963 864 262; fax: +34 963 864 161. 3 For a detailed discussion of participation status within different types of polylogues (including on-line ones), for example, see Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2004) and Marcoccia (2004). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.03.005