117 Комуникация, медии, социални мрежи Politeness, gender, and English-medium Facebook communication Marta Dąbrowska Institute of English Studies Jagiellonian University, Cracow E-mail: marta.b.dabrowska@uj.edu.pl Abstract: Computer Mediated Communication has made it possible for its users to interact freely with each other despite physical distance. Social networking sites, notably Facebook, particularly encourage informal contacts between their users, which are not infrequently maintained in English as a language of international communication. The purpose of Facebook-mediated interaction is to exchange information on a variety of subjects, but what appears to be its overriding aim is to sustain contacts and good relations with one’s friends and acquaintances, as well as enhance one’s own, usually positive, image. The phatic function of language appears therefore to be one of the chief traits of Facebook communication. The primary aim of the paper, inspired by my research of the use of English as the first, second and foreign language, represented in the study by numerically parallel groups of British, Indian, and Polish Facebook users (cf. Dąbrowska 2013) [1], is therefore to evaluate the character of the strategies of politeness recorded in the collected material. The study focuses on the identification of particular intentionally polite speech acts (cf. Watts 2003) [2] expressed in the posts generated by the three aforementioned groups of users, and their discussion within the framework of Brown and Levinson’s (1978/1987) [3] classical division into positive and negative politeness, their frequency as well as the form of the language shaped by conventions of online politeness. Moreover, the discussion examines examples of emotive language (cf. Janney and Arndt 2005) [4] which additionally broaden the scope as well as reinforce the strength of polite meanings. The analysis is carried out with respect to both the cultural and linguistic background of the authors of the posts and, primarily, the users’ gender, which, as will be demonstrated, proves to be the major factor influencing the frequencies of use of a variety of polite meanings, with women invariably taking the lead in this respect, regardless of their diverse cultural and linguistic background. Keywords: politeness, genderlects, English as a global language, Computer Mediated Communication, Facebook. Introduction The material used for the analysis following were posts written by British, Indian and Polish users of English, originally used to investigate the linguistic behaviour of users of English as the first, second and foreign language in order to identify possible similarities and differences in the use of this tongue (cf. Dąbrowka 2013) [5]. They were selected as representatives of Kachru’s (1992) [6] circles model of the use of English, depending on the status of the English language in the respective countries, i.e., the Inner Circle (with the British group as a model), the Outer Circle (the Indian group), and the Expanding Circle (the Polish group). As the above discussion relied on the material excerpted from a social networking site, a platform which, apart from allowing its users to exchange news and views serves also as a tool for maintaining friendships, a natural spin-off of the primary goal of the research turned out to be observations concerning the strategies the platform users chose in order to strengthen their ties and rapport with others. The following is therefore an analysis of how the authors of the collected posts, evenly divided into groups of women and men, behaved in relation to others when writing on Facebook. Particular attention is paid to whether their posts conveyed polite meanings and of what type, considering that some of the users utilise English not only as the first, but also a second or a foreign language. The paper is organised in the following way: brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Jagiellonian Univeristy Repository