24.2941, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Arendholz (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2941. Fri Jul 19 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2941, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics: Arendholz (2013)

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Mateja Schuck, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 11:35:32
From: Laura Paterson [l.l.paterson at leeds.ac.uk]
Subject: (In)Appropriate Online Behavior

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-801.html

AUTHOR: Jenny  Arendholz
TITLE: (In)Appropriate Online Behavior
SUBTITLE: A pragmatic analysis of message board relations
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 229
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Laura L. Paterson, University of Leeds

SUMMARY

Arendholz’s study addresses the interpersonal element of online interaction,
focusing specifically on fifty threads taken from ‘The Student Room’ website.
She provides copious examples from her data in the latter chapters of the
book, but the beginning is somewhat overshadowed with general discussions of
(im)politeness theories. The introduction (titled as Chapter One) begins with
an acknowledgment of the heterogeneity of the internet and the notion that it
is fruitless to try and assess politeness across the whole web. The author
notes that any study of online language is only a snap-shot of a state of
affairs. Also provided are four clear research questions (which are returned
to in the conclusion).

In Chapter Two, the author gives a brief history of the development of the
internet, although there are very few direct links made to internet-based
pragmatics. The chapter is focused on computer mediated communication (CMC) in
general rather than on the particular text type selected for analysis.
Arendholz discusses the use of CMC as a social tool and strongly justifies her
argument that online communication can have interpersonal impact. She then
provides a comprehensive and informative overview of ‘The Student Room’ forum.
The author demonstrates how the fixed-elements surrounding each post (e.g. the
user’s name, time on the forum, number of posts, affiliations, reputation,
etc.) convey interpersonal information. This leads to the conclusion that
there are standardised social cues in each post, independent of their
linguistic content.

Chapter Three is the first of three theory-heavy chapters where the author
presents her literature review and justifies her approach. Arendholz uses the
concept of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) and includes a
section on codes of conduct and emerging online norms. The second theory-heavy
chapter, Chapter Four, moves away from the discussion of online data and
consists of a general overview of theories of (im)politeness  (Brown and
Levinson 1987, Culpeper 1996, etc.). Towards the end of the chapter, Arendholz
draws the focus back to the matter at hand and there is an interesting
discussion in Section 4.4 of what needs to be retained, adapted, or dropped
from existing frameworks to make them applicable for internet-based data. For
example, she keeps the notions of positive and negative face, but rejects what
she terms “static” theories (p. 75) based on Grice’s Cooperative Principle
(1975), arguing that such models “cannot do justice to the dynamic nature of
communication” (p. 75).

Chapter Five is more focused on message boards, but does drop back into
explaining theories of impoliteness in places. We start to see some data in
this chapter, and Section 5.7 on flaming is particularly on-topic. By Chapter
Six, Arendholz (correctly) proposes that people do not construct their
identities online independent of their offline personas because their offline
identities are “too deeply entrenched” (p. 114) in their behaviour. Rather,
users develop an online face, or, more likely, faces which they choose to
perform. In order to explain this, Arendholz rejects the notion of identity
construction (Locher 2011) and instead proposes that creating online personae
is effectively “face constitution” (p. 114). There is some close analysis of
data in this chapter. Arendholz analyses both users’ profile pages and some of
their initial posts, with screenshots to support a multimodal analysis. From
this point forward, the book is really focused on the analysis promised in its
title.

Chapter Seven is clearly structured and begins with a justification for
Arendholz’s chosen method of analysis. It focuses on the initial posts of
fifty different threads on ‘The Student Room’ website (with Chapter Eight
focusing on the rest of the posts under each heading). The chapter is full of
examples that are analysed systematically. The author explains her data well
and it is clear to the reader exactly what Arendholz’s corpus consists of.
There is explanation of how the data has been separated into six categories
(i.e. Getting to know others, Looking for like-minded others, Asking for
advice, Asking for opinions, Blowing off steam, and Offering
advice/information), with the author drawing out the core purposes for
starting a forum thread. She covers some of the ‘standard’ features of CMC,
such as smileys, but doesn’t devote too much time or attention to these
things, noting that they are only one of a selection of ways in which users of
‘The Student Room’ can convey interpersonal meaning. She also notes that there
isn’t a dichotomy of being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ online, as her data shows that even
people who are labelled ‘trouble makers’ can have positive reputations on the
site, and their posts can be cooperative as well as controversial in nature.
At the end of the chapter, the author attempts to guess what alterations have
been made to several posts since they were first published. However, she does
acknowledge that there is no way to tell what was added or removed.

Chapter Eight is unusual in that it represents 36% of the book and is almost a
hundred pages long. This chapter is the heart of the analysis. Each of the six
categories identified in Chapter Seven are discussed in turn. Arendholz’s
qualitative analysis of threads dominates the chapter, with supporting
quantitative data used to summarise each section. Some of the examples given
in this chapter are presented in earlier chapters, but there is also a lot of
new data. The major findings of Arendholz’s work are that users of message
boards tend to behave cooperatively, with most posts being unmarked for
(im)politeness and thus conforming to apparent online norms. Based on her
data, Arendholz lists some key features of creating/perpetuating interpersonal
relationships in forums, and focuses on those cases in her data where these
norms break down. Whilst direct interaction between participants is relatively
low across the whole corpus (data on p. 165), the analysis is still fruitful.

The five-page ending that is Chapter Nine (the conclusion) reads as rather
brief given the chapter that precedes it. The author targets each research
question in turn. However, only the response to the final research question(s)
(i.e. “How are interpersonal relations formally expressed and interactively
negotiated by experience and new message board members? How many instances of
(the various types of) positively and negatively marked behaviour can be
found?” (p. 261)) focuses on what users of ‘The Student Room’ actually wrote
in their posts. The conclusion focuses directly on the questions the author
has asked, but there is no extended discussion of the results of Chapters
Seven and Eight.

EVALUATION

This is an interesting study in a relatively new field of research and, as
such, should be forgiven for some of its structural issues. The heavy
end-weighting of the analysis and the disproportionately long Chapter Eight
are much more focused on the topic promised in the title of the book than the
theory-heavy chapters that Arendholz begins with. Whilst the theoretical
discussion which dominates the first two thirds of the work is interesting, it
is not always focused on the title of the book and thus the reader is left
waiting for the explicit links between theory and analysis to become clear.
The largely theory-based chapters, especially Chapter Four, may have been
included to expand the potential audience of the book and make it more
accessible to those unfamiliar with theories of politeness, but overarching
theories are not really what this book is about. Given the title of the book,
it is unlikely that a reader would be expecting an introduction to politeness
theories, and Chapters Three and Four are, for the most part, distracting to
readers who already have experience in this field. Nevertheless, these
chapters could potentially be useful as advanced reading for students wishing
to undertake projects in internet-based pragmatics. They would also be of
interest to scholars researching how theories of offline behaviour (in the
sense of non-CMC interaction) need to be adapted for the analysis of
internet-based data.

For those solely focused on the analysis of online language, the data does not
come to the fore until Chapter Seven (of nine) and this is a little too late.
Qualitative and quantitative analyses should have been introduced long before,
especially given that there aren’t many links back to the theory-focused
chapters, which draws their relevance into question. The analysis chapters are
disproportionately long compared to the rest of the book and the key findings
would have perhaps been better disseminated throughout the chapters rather
than dealt with all in one place.

Whilst the data is largely accessible and well-presented, there are a few
issues. When discussing different posters on the message boards, Arendholz
uses the initial letter of their avatar for reference. This can sometimes lead
to confusion as it is unclear whether ‘D’ in one thread is the same
participant as ‘D’ in another thread. Sometimes participants are only
separated by capitalisation (e.g. ‘A’ and ‘a’, p. 229). Additionally, some
examples are debated beyond what the data can support. For example, Arendholz
proposes that a dialogue may have ended because of the inclusion of an ‘x’ at
the end of a post (p. 173), yet provides no evidence for this conclusion.
Whilst these are relatively small qualms, it is perhaps more detrimental that
the definition of politeness proposed on page 83, which underpins Arendholz’s
classification of data, is worded rather strangely: “From the speaker’s
perspective, politeness is rational because purposeful (non-)linguistic
behaviour, which (un)consciously aims at maintaining social order by showing
consideration for others”.

Nevertheless, this is a thought-provoking study, and readers have the option
to focus their efforts on Chapters Seven and Eight, paying less heed to
familiar discussions of politeness. Arendholz’s results, which are highly
testable, indicate that there is a culture of unmarked online cooperation,
with both overt politeness markers and rudeness being kept to a minimum.
Overall, whilst the data is certainly worthy of academic study, the
theory-heavy chapters that make up most of the book leave the reader wanting
more discussion of online forums and less general theorising. Yet, as a
starting point for research on pragmatics in forums, Arendholz’s general
approach and categorisation of data is very useful and arguably robust.

REFERENCES

Brown, Penelope & Steven Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in
Language.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of
Pragmatics 25(3). 349-376.

Grice, Herbert Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L.
Morgan (eds). Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, 41-58. New York: Academic
Press.

Lave, Jean & Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral
Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locher, Miriam A. 2011. Situated impoliteness: The interface between identity
work and relational construction. In Bethan Davies, Michael Haugh & Andrew J.
Merrison (eds). Situated Politeness, 187-208. London: Continuum.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Laura Paterson works as a Teaching Fellow in English Language at the
University of Leeds. Her research focuses on interplay between social and
syntactic factors in the selection of epicene pronouns in written British
English. She is also part of a research group analysing discourses of marriage
in the UK.








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