1.1 Background of the study

In the field of pragmatics, politeness is always a classic and widely researchtopic. Since the 1970s, the study of politeness research has aroused many scholars attention at home and abroad (e.g., Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987; Gu, 1990;Lakoff, 1973; Leech, 1983). Politeness refers to the words appropriately spoken bypeople, it plays an important role in coordinating the interpersonal relationshipsbetween people, for avoiding conflicts, promoting smooth communication and socialharmony. Nowadays, studies on politeness have achieved relatively remarkable results.Compared with politeness research, the impoliteness phenomena are also common inhuman communication, people sometimes need to use impolite language to expresstheir true meaning and achieve one s aim. However, it can be found that theresearches on impoliteness are few, which are neglected by the academic circles for along time.

Therefore, due to the imbalance study between politeness and impoliteness,studies about impoliteness need to be considered and recognized. In the early studieson impoliteness, according to Brown and Levinson (1978), they believe thatimpoliteness is the parasite of politeness. Leech (1983) considers impoliteness as marginal behavior of human normal verbal communication (1983, p.105). Culpeper(1996) lays a solid foundation and setting a clear keynote for impoliteness research, sothe field of linguistic impoliteness has quickly developed, speeded up in themid-1990s, and started on the rise in 2008. And scholars find that except for theimpoliteness in daily communication, it also plays an important role in other differentcontexts, but most of the research corpus on impoliteness comes from the discourse ofliterary works, military training, dramas, and TV programs. In recent years, with thedevelopment of the internet, and the freedom and high-efficiency of internetcommunication, there exist a large number of face-threatening behaviors and verbalimpoliteness phenomenon in the online platforms. However, studies on impolitenessdiscourses in the background of internet multimedia are fewer, and there is still a lotto be researched.

Figure 1. 1 Number of online shoppers and utilization rate from 2016 to 2020

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1.2 Objectives of the study

The present study takes Culpeper s impoliteness theory as the theoreticalframework for exploring impoliteness strategies used in online shopping consumers negative reviews, and some objectives are expected to be achieved in this study.

At first, this study attempts to find what kinds of impoliteness strategies are usedin online shopping consumers negative reviews, and also make a detailed analysisand interpretation about them

Then, this study aims to conclude some pragmatic functions of impolitenessstrategies in online shopping consumers negative reviews.

Thirdly, it is hoped that some possible factors affecting the use of impolitenessstrategies can be found.

As for the theoretical significance, it is known that politeness theory and facetheory are the core of interpersonal pragmatics, and the researches studies onpoliteness are fruitful. Although impoliteness also exists commonly as well aspoliteness, its researches are comparatively few, especially the verbal impoliteness inthe internet context. Therefore, in this study, the analysis of the impolitenessphenomenon in online shopping consumers negative reviews can verify the universalapplicability of Culpeper s impoliteness theory, and also attempts to find some othernew impoliteness strategies, so as to further understand the study of impoliteness.Besides, the study also explores the pragmatic functions of impoliteness strategies andsome influencing factors that cause the usage of impoliteness strategies online.

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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Studies on impoliteness

This section mainly introduces the various definitions of impoliteness,classifications of impoliteness, application studies of impoliteness strategies, and thestudies on impoliteness in the CMC context from different scholars at home andabroad.

2.1.1 Definitions of impoliteness

As for impoliteness, it is a multidisciplinary study. Although there are someimpoliteness researches from different perspectives, impoliteness has no commonlyaccepted definition. That is, different scholars have different definitions ofimpoliteness, so it is hard to give a detailed and clear definition of impoliteness.

Foreign scholars have different ideas on the definition of impoliteness fromdifferent perspectives, which reflect their research emphasis. Lachenicht firstlyproposes aggravating language as impoliteness, and he defines it as the abusive andinsulting language (1980, p. 607). The aggravating language attempts to hurt or faceattack the hearers.

Leech (1983) maintains impoliteness as a marginal behavior of human normalverbal communication. Similarly, Beebe (1995) believes that impoliteness is theviolation of social norms behavior and it is a face-threatening act, which disobeys therecognized social norms of interaction under the social context.

Limberg (2008) holds that impoliteness is an utterance threat that goes beyondthe standards of proper behavior and it intentionally threatens each other s face in aconfrontation. Mills (2009) maintains that impoliteness is triggered by specific eventsor words, which violates the norms of behavior of specific speech communities.

Holmes et al state that verbal impoliteness is linguistic behavior assessed by thehearer as threatening her or his face or social identity. (2008, p. 196). Locher andWatts (2008) note that each of such impolite terms will produce a particular kind ofnegative evaluation of behavior, which means, impoliteness is a participant sjudgment of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the social behavior of theco-participants in an interaction.

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2.2 Studies on online consumer reviews

Among the different sources of information available online, consumer reviewsare now widely used, online consumer reviews as a new genre which has receivedincreasing research attention. It can be regarded as the written language, Bickart andSchindler (2001) state that consumer reviews as written language from the perspectiveof consumers, that can exert influence on sellers and other consumers, so they havegreat influence. Chevalier and Mayzlin (2006) use Amazon and Barnes andNoble to find that the consumers read the text of reviews rather than relying onlyon the summary statistics. Vásquez (2014) holds that online consumer reviews nowplay an increasingly important role in influencing potential consumers when they seekinformation online, and the electronic-word of mouth (e-wom) has the characteristicsof large scale and fast transmission speed, that means, information technology enablesa single person s opinion to immediately reach thousands or even millions ofconsumers, and the consumers are more and more relying on e-wom.

What s more, the expression of linguistic information in reviews is also crucialbecause it can impact other potential consumers and sellers, also the language used inonline consumer reviews is still under research, many scholars begin to concern aboutwhat and how it is said in online consumer reviews. Vásquez (2011) claims thatlinguistic research inclines to concern the organizational characteristics, componentsand move structures in online consumer reviews, and she describes the formsinvolved in online consumer reviews discourse, which are the imperative sentences,first and second personal pronouns, conventional formulas, and interrogativesentences. Cao et al. (2011) maintain that semantic features are more important thanbasic and stylistic features in influencing the beneficial voting of online consumerreviews, which with extreme views garner more favorable votes than those withmixed or neutral views.

Table3. 1 Culpeper s impoliteness strategies

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