Politeness Strategies in Chinese Online Public Discourse A Corpus Analysis Based on Social Media Interactions

Politeness is one of the most fundamental principles of language communication that has special expression and practical significance in the area of online mass discussion. The research uses the corpus of 120,000 viable texts on the three major Chinese social media sites, i.e., Weibo, Douban, and Zhihu, to investigate systematically the typological distribution, platform-based differences, and the causes of the use of politeness strategies in the Chinese online public discourse. Based on this framework and incorporating the linguistic features of Chinese, the paper combines corpus analysis, quantitative statistical approaches and qualitative analysis. Results include: positive politeness strategies are the most common ones in Chinese online public discourse (58.3%) and negative politeness tactics are the second most common (32.7%) and non-public politeness strategies are the least common (9.0%); The specificities in discourse contexts and user features lead to different politeness strategy selection patterns: Zhihu has the largest percentage of negative politeness strategies (41.2%), Douban has the largest share of positive politeness strategies (65.8%), and Weibo has relatively higher prevalence of non-public politeness strategies (12.5%). There arise several important determinants of politeness strategy choice including topic categories, interactant identity, and discourse purpose. This paper has explored the concept of politeness strategies in Chinese online public discourse to identify a multifaceted picture that can be influenced by cultural norms, interactive setting, and technological benefits. It contributes to the interlingual research on politeness theory in online contexts and gives empirical evidence of the understanding of interactive rules and normative systems regulating the Chinese online public discourse.