Jordanian Males’ Impoliteness Strategies While Commenting on the Physical Appearance of Females on Facebook

This study aims to examine Jordanian males’ comments on females’ physical appearance on Facebook to identify the impoliteness strategies that Jordanian males utilize in online communication. The socio-cultural factors affecting the selection of impoliteness behavior in males’ comments are also investigated. As for the corpus of the study, a total of 470 comments and replies were chosen from 32 females’ picture posts posted on two different Jordanian groups on Facebook. This study draws on Culpeper’s (1996) impoliteness framework. All Culpeper’s (1996) impoliteness strategies except withholding impoliteness (i.e., bald-on-record, sarcasm/mock, negative, positive) were employed. It was also found that making a clear boundary between different impoliteness strategies is not easy; more than one impoliteness strategy can be realized by the same expression. Furthermore, males were found to use other additional impoliteness strategies not mentioned in Culpeper’s (1996) impoliteness framework, namely, third-party implicit impoliteness, supplications, and negative interjections. The data analysis also revealed that some comments were subsumed under new categories not mentioned in previous (im)politeness frameworks: ambiguous (im)politeness and adversative (im)politeness. The use of such various strategies can be ascribed to the effect of socio-cultural and religious background on males’ behavior.