A socio-pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in Iraqi Arabic Facebook comments

الملخص EN

This study aims at investigating Culpeper's (1996, 2005) impoliteness strategies by analyzing 300 Iraqi Arabic facebook comments (of which 150 comments are employed by males and 150 by females).

These comments are collected from Iraqi formal facebook pages.

It selects ten Arabic topics that come under the categories of entertainment, fashion, lifestyle, health, food, political state and social matters.

For the purpose of this study, impolite comments are chosen from online communication.

Our analysis demonstrates that all strategies of impoliteness are applicable in computer mediated communication except the one which is called "withhold politeness" that can be occurred only in face to face contact, not in written communication.

Moreover, the present study reveals a new strategy called "defamation" which is not part of Culpeper's strategies, but it occurs under the umbrella of impoliteness.

Finally, it was investigated that the most used strategy among Culpeper's strategies is "positive impoliteness" which is used by male participants more than females.

On the other hand, the less used strategy was