Impolite Communication Practices as a Community-Building Tool in Sports News Comments

Abstract

Conflict discourse studies provide a valuable insight into linguistic and sociocultural ideologies of online communities. They also may offer effective approaches to linguistic detoxification. This research featured online communication of sport fans. Their discourse is interdiscursive, possesses a certain netiquette, and reflects the social and ideological diversity within the community. The authors explored common speech strategies aimed at threatening the social identity of outsiders or at the acquisition of power. The material involved an array of comments posted on Sports.ru: each example was tested for speech aggression, and the conflict-marked comments were described from the strategy perspective. The sampling relied on the general intention and expressive vocabulary aimed at the addressee. The frequency distribution of impoliteness strategies revealed that users often tended to assert power through personal characterization of their opponents, e.g., agism, sarcasm, hypercorrect speech behavior, identity attacks via derogatory team nominations, etc. The analysis identified various conflict strategies employed to form derogatory nominations, as well as defined the socio-cultural characteristics that marked the addressee as a target of conflictladen speech behavior.