Politeness On Facebook: A Pragmatic Study of the Comments on President Buhari’s 2016 Independence Day Speech
Keywords:
politeness, Facebook, pragmatics, independentAbstract
Linguistic politeness deals with the public self-image of an individual. This is the emotional and social sense of self that everyone has and expects everyone else to recognize. This paper studied politeness strategies in the comments of the people on the speech of President Buhari on the occasion of 56th independence anniversary celebration, held on October 1st, 2016. Data were gathered on the Facebook timeline of the president. The data were analyzed using politeness as a pragmatic theory. We discovered some politeness strategies such as Face Saving Acts (FSA), Face Threatening Act (FTA), Deference, Off-record and Indirectness. We argued that this has been having positive impact on the politics of the country. We also recommend that people should observe and respect other people’s face in their comments.
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