“Mama Zimbi, pls help me!” – Gender differences in (im)politeness in Ghanaian English advice-giving on Facebook

Abstract

This paper explores (im)politeness and gender in a specific advicegiving practice of young Ghanaians online. The data is collected from the Facebook fan page of Mama Zimbi, a radio and TV personality from Ghana, and consists of a sample of 400 messages in response to two male and two female advice-seekers' problem messages. The messages are analyzed according to form-and content-based categories, focussing on the directness and content of advice, the content of discursive moves other than advice, and address terms.The results indicate that very direct forms (i.e., imperatives) are the preferred way by both males and females to give advice. Directness, however, cannot be equated with impoliteness or politeness, which rather depends on a combination of the content of advice, further discursive moves and additional elements such as politeness markers. Although there are trends towards more cooperative advice by females and more negative responses directed at males, there are many exceptions to this and no clear gender differences are found. The high number of rude or sarcastic comments most probably serves the function of entertaining readers, while other users try to maintain politeness on the page by giving sincere advice and/or scolding those who insult advice-seekers.

Journal of Politeness Research: Introduction

“…This period saw further theoretical debate on the basis of empirical findings Grainger et al 2015;Hampel 2015;Johns and Félix-Brasdefer 2015;Lauriks et al 2015;Makoni 2015). These latter two special issues have arisen out of the need to expanding politeness research to other geographical areas (also see Brown 2010Brown , 2013Kádár and Mills 2013;Hatfield and Hahn 2014;Peterson and Vaattovaara 2014) and to further investigating politeness in non-verbal forms, such as the complex relationship between prosody and politeness.…”

A Comparative Study on Online Advice-Seeking Strategies between Malaysian and Australian Women

“…As such, research on advice is diverse covering advice-seeking (Ortega et al, 2020), advice-giving (Bjørkdahl & Druglitrø, 2018), and reception to advice (Duan et al, 2018;Van Swol et al, 2019). Past research on advice has also examined various factors affecting these advice-related practices such as the relationship between advice and politeness (Goldsmith & MacGeorge, 2000), gender (Hampel, 2015), topics of discussion (Locher, 2006), culture (Morrow, 2012), contexts (Limberg & Locher, 2012), and characteristics of interlocutors (Gaertig & Simmons, 2018).…”

“…Nonetheless, despite advice being a much researched area as mentioned, studies that relate advice strategies to culture are fairly limited. These studies focused predominantly on the European (Chentsova-Dutton & Vaughn, 2012), American (Glide, 2015), Asian (Morrow, 2012), and the African (Hampel, 2015) regions. Similarly, cross-cultural comparison studies on advice strategies also centered on only a few cultures, for instance comparing the Russian and American cultures (Chentsova-Dutton & Vaughn, 2012), the American and Chinese cultures (Feng, 2015;Feng & Feng, 2011), and the East Asian and the Euro-Canadian cultures (Ji et al, 2016).…”

“What is Wrong With You People That You are Happy Someone has Covid” Impoliteness in the Coronavirus Pandemic Era

“…Finally, whilst Hampel (2015 , p. 104) argues that “individuals’ perceptions of appropriate or polite behavior also play a vital role since differing expectations and interpretations of (im)politeness may lead to conflicts”, Haugh (2013 , p. 58) emphasizes that “the evaluation is one way to study impoliteness”, since, “impoliteness occurs not so much when the speaker produces behavior but rather when the hearer evaluates that behavior.” With this in mind, a thorough metapragmatic examination of each corpus is carried out so as to determine users’ own evaluation of the ongoing flow of interventions within the comment threads (see subsection 4.1).…”