Abstract
This study is a cyber-linguistic investigation of politeness principle in selected WhatsApp messages. It aims at examining the use of politeness principle and how it is essential for maintaining social friendliness among WhatsApp users. As such, this research is built upon pragmatic model of politeness. Politeness plays a crucial and significant role in all cultures and societies for keeping relationships and saving faces. Although politeness is common to all cultures and languages but how it is realised is different from one culture to another. This research therefore intends to understudy its applicability on the internet community. The research sourced its data from individual and group platforms. Three chats of twelve conversations were randomly selected and the data were presented and analysed using descriptive quantitative approach. The results of the analysis show that there are several instances of observance and non-observance of the politeness maxims. Findings from the study therefore revealed that in internet/digital communication, interlocutors or participants tend to observe tact maxim more often than the rest of the maxims and they also fail to observe generosity maxim while the agreement maxim is not applicable in the two instances (observed and non-observed maxims).
Keywords
Language, Pragmatics, Cyber-pragmatics, Politeness Principle, WhatsApp
Citations
IRE Journals:
Abdulazeez, Jamiu Adewale , Salisu, Muhammed Raj
"Politeness in Digital Communication: A Study of Pragmatics" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 9 Issue 1 2025 Page 1072-1078
IEEE:
Abdulazeez, Jamiu Adewale , Salisu, Muhammed Raj
"Politeness in Digital Communication: A Study of Pragmatics" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 9(1)
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