Linguistic Impoliteness Strategies in Sina Weibo Comments

By applying Culpeper’s anatomy of impoliteness strategies published in 1996, this study aims to explore types of impoliteness strategies used by Chinese in a computer-mediated communication context Sina Weibo. One post released by Fan Bingbing Studio Account concerning the Fan’s purported tax fraud is chosen as the instrumental case. Quantitative results show that four strategies are employed in Sina Weibo context: bald on record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness and sarcasm or mock impoliteness. Among the strategies employed, the most frequent type is positive impoliteness strategy while the least frequent type is sarcasm or mock impoliteness strategy. Withhold politeness strategy does not exist in current data pool. Qualitative analysis provides examples for each strategy presented in the data. With a data pool containing 5873 impolite utterances, this study not only provides more supports for Culpeper’s anatomy in 1996 but also produces more empirical data for the online linguistic impoliteness in the context of China.