A polidez lingüística em sala de bate-papo na internet

Abstract

Studies on Linguistic Politeness urge to investigate the verbal behavior adopted by the individuals whose goal it’s to avoid or reduce possible conflicts in their interactions. Assuming that the majority of research about the theme is restricted as face-to-face interactions, and further more, nowadays, many social relationships are established on interactional virtual environments. We propose to analyze in which way the partakers in a chat room use strategies and pragmatic constraints of linguistic politeness on their interactions and under which purpose they are used. Therefore were selected 23 chats that took place in a public environment of a chat room directed to people over 50 from December (2006) to May (2007).The analyze was constituted by the correlation of analyzes’ models of linguistic politeness presented by Brown and Levinson (1987) and Leech (1983; 2005). The results show that, in spite of the anonymity, the partakers of the chat room build and preserve the identities assembled in the chat room, and in the chat room they establish interactional ties, presenting an intimacy distinguished by: a) the jokey tone of the conversations; b) the use of identity and in-group markers; c) the manifest of sympathy and affection; and d) the concern to reduce the weight and the association to face threaten act (FTA).From these results, we can conclude that the involvement, the intimacy, and the knowledge among the partakers, in and out of virtual environment, are factors that interfere the choice of strategies and pragmatic constraints of linguistic politeness.