“#HaveYouNoShame”: Unraveling the pragmatics of impolite political hashtags

IF 1.8 1区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-01-01 DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2024.12.004

Seyed Mohammadreza Mortazavi , Hamed Zandi

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Politicians are increasingly using existing hashtags or creating new ones to amplify the visibility and dissemination of their messages. However, research on the pragmatic functions of hashtags in conflictive political discourse remains relatively scarce. This study examines the pragmatic functions of hashtags and how they affected the (im)polite tone of the tweets by the Iranian Foreign Minister and the U.S. Secretary of State between November 2018 and November 2019, focusing on the ongoing conflict between their respective countries. Hashtags (N = 294) related to the conflict were collected and thematically analyzed. Several categories of hashtags, including slogans, institutions, countries and regions, treaties, conferences, cultural references were identified. Their pragmatic functions included alliance building, othering, presenting a positive self-image, warning, criticism, and justifications. The analysis, informed by Culpeper's (2011) impoliteness framework, indicates that hashtags serve strategic purposes, allowing politicians to justify face threats and impolite language by invoking moral order. We discuss how even seemingly neutral-sounding hashtags like country names can be used to intensify the impoliteness of a tweet, imply solidarity or othering, and influence public opinion.

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来源期刊

Journal of Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

18.80%

发文量

219

期刊介绍： Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.