On-line polylogues and impoliteness: The case of postings sent in response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube video

The overall aim of this paper is to investigate impoliteness in a particular on-line polylogal setting – YouTube postings (c. 13,000 words) triggered by the ‘Obama Reggaeton’ video, which was released during the 2008 US democratic primaries. This is done through integration of quantitative/qualitative analytic tools and of (im)politeness1 and (im)politeness 2 approaches. A two-prong experimental study is used in order to examine impoliteness realisation and interpretation in the corpus. Findings reveal clear patterns in the realisation of impoliteness strategies, including a preference for on-record impoliteness saliently oriented towards attacking the positive face needs of one's on-line co-participants. In this respect, findings also call for a refinement of existing taxonomies of impoliteness. Regarding the interpretation of impoliteness, the analysis reveals considerable overlap between ‘lay’ (impoliteness1) and ‘analyst’ (impoliteness2) assessments. The former, in addition, are found to relate principally to norms of public discourse associated with civility.