Flaming in Internet Forums on Abortion: A Contrastive Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

Flaming refers to an online vitriolic verbal brawl where participants are not respectful of each other and cannot control their tempers. They often trade insults and call each other names. Recent developments of the Internet and SNS have commonly created an epidemic of this phenomenon almost all around the world, including Korea and America. However, the strategies that people use to degrade each other vehemently when their opinions clash can vary from language to language. The present study is an attempt to discover and compare the characteristics and structure of flaming in Korean and in English in Internet forums about abortion one of the hottest issues that frequently draw virulent and violent expressions, especially in computer-mediated communication. The commonalities and differences are investigated from the perspectives of Culpeper’s theory of impoliteness. To this end, a total of 200 threads posted in four different Korean and English YouTube forums on abortion were collected and analyzed in terms of impoliteness strategies. The distribution and frequency of impoliteness types and strategies employed as well as the structure of flaming in each language are discussed from the perspective of contrastive pragmatics.