Existing Literature around pragmatics reveals that the concept of (im)politeness continued getting impetus in the contemporary scholarship, especially, with the increasing advancements in information technology which shifts the interest of most linguistic studies towards computer mediated discourse. It is further evident that most of the researches carried out on the said concept focus more on dialogic and monologue data: drama/play, political debates, class room discourses, court texts amongst, with minute attention forthcoming from a polylogue discourse(s). Setting on this background, the present study attempts to interrogate the identified less examined data-type to explore face threatening instances and self-imposition of powerful discourse participants over the less powerful interlocutors. The dataset for this study was generated from a WhatsApp group chat of ASUU members, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Federal University of Kashere. Purposeful sampling technique has been adopted for the facts not all the chats are relevant to the research. The most preponderant impoliteness strategies realised in the discourse are Insults and dismissals/silencers, while the former further classified into three viz, personalised negative assertions; personalised negative references; and personalised third-person negative references.
Citation: Jaafar, Ahmad Wakili; Mshebwala, Comfort Usman and Oladipo, Abiola Mary (2022) Exploring Face Threatening Acts and Dominance of Powerful Interlocutor(S) Over “Other(S)” in ASUU Group Chat, Federal University of Kashere, British Journal of English Linguistics , Vol. 10, Issue 4, pp.40-50
Keywords: Impoliteness, Pragmatics, face threatening, polylogue discourse., self-imposition
