Politeness strategies in academic digital discourse

Abstract

The paper explores the discourse strategies used in academic discourse in the informal setting of a personal web page. The aim is to study a digital variation of academic discourse that blends features of spoken and written academic discourse. It typically provides spontaneous responses using direct ways of expressing ideas. Unlike scholarly discussions at conferences, academic etiquette and diplomatic language are not always maintained and personal attacks and emotive statements occur; participants tend to express their preferences, professional standpoints, ideas and personal attitudes frankly and openly. Expressing criticism and disagreement, the participants may or may not use politeness strategies to mitigate face-threatening responses. Mapping the variety of these strategies, I work with those parts of academic web pages that are devoted to vivid and uncensored discussions of the subject matter. The analysis is theoretically rooted in the conception of interpersonal rhetoric as defined by Leech (1983). The research draws from a corpus of articles and related responses randomly chosen from personal and institutional academic web pages.

A cross cultural analysis of conjuncts as indicators of the interaction and negotiation of meaning in research articles

“…despite in Example 12 below); the study of these is beyond the scope of this article, however. (For some culture-specific aspects when solving conflicts and/or communicating (dis)agreements in academic discourse, see Miššíková, 2012b Conjuncts expressing contrast/concession tend to be frequently applied not only in my data (2.67-2.96) but in all written academic discourse, since they express relations that are, according to Kortmann (1991, p.161), regarded as "the most complex of all semantic relations that may hold between parts of a discourse". Thus it is not surprising that they tend to be expressed overtly by conjuncts in the case of this study, for example (cf.…”

Critical reading of online news commentary headlines: Stylistic and pragmatic aspects

“…Stylistic analysis of interpersonal rhetoric involves examination of expressive language choices, which are contextual discourse strategies for facilitating cooperative interactions and understandings (Miššíková, 2012). The headlines in this research are examined in terms of their stylistic and interactive ability to effectively trigger reader attention and interest, and the focus is on further dimensions in this interface.…”