Functional analysis of impoliteness in Facebook discussion threads in Swedish.
What is it about?
This paper is a quantitative and qualitative investigation of impoliteness (i.e., intentional offensive behavior) in Facebook discussion threads about the Swedish government's response to the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. In terms of enactment of value orientations classified as different attitudes within the systemic framework, the analysis employs existing models of impoliteness and combines them with systemic functional approaches. As a result, the picture that emerges is one of a socially complex welfare state paradigm and its obligations to an individual.
Why is it important?
Impoliteness has not been systematically studied in languages other than English. This seems the first study done on Swedish. Also, combining the corpus-driven models of impoliteness with a hands-on functional model yields a fuller picture of the social conflict underlying the analyzed data.