Evaluative discourse and politeness in university students' communication through social networking sites

Abstract

This article explores evaluative discourse on social networking sites (henceforth SNSs), paying special attention to the important role played by the expression of attitude and positive politeness in the management of interpersonal rapport. The specific contextual features of SNSs seem to trigger the production of attitudinal meanings of affect, judgement and appreciation, which are exploited for the relational work involved in the construction and maintenance of positive face. The corpus for the study consists of a random sample of 100 messages with 248 evaluative utterances exchanged among university students in the United Kingdom and the United States on a particular site, i.e., Facebook, during the two-year period 2010-2012. Analysis of evaluative discourse is approached from the theories of appraisal (Martin and White 2005, Bednarek 2008) and politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). The methodology for processing the data borrows quantitative techniques from Corpus Linguistics (CL), involving the coding and statistical treatment of the sample with UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell 2011).