A Pragmatic Study on Impoliteness in Sina Weibo Comments——from the Perspective of Morality

Abstract

This study takes comments on immoral social events in hot topics in Sina Weibo as the data, and collects 200 impolite comments from Comment Page of four Sina Weibo news events. Based on Culpeper’s and Bousfi eld’s concepts of impolite strategies and Chinese morality as the theoretical basis, we use a qualitative research method to classify and interpret the impolite comments; what moral expectations are refl ected in the impolite comments from a moral perspective. The study found that:comments mainly employed impoliteness strategies such as challenging, insulting, and cursing; some frequently occurring moral expectations were discussed in these comments, such as: being fi lial to parents and being benevolent. This study reveals the causes of impolite comments based on a moral perspective, and these fi ndings are important for understanding the interrelationship between impoliteness and morality.