College Students’ Use of Impoliteness Expression in the WeChat Diction

The purpose of this study was to investigate college students’ use of impolite-ness expressions in WeChat diction and what factors influence college students’ use of impoliteness expressions. In-depth interview was used. The chat-ting records of a large WeChat group with 134 members—Hubin 12 Hous-ings’ 2021 graduate Management group in a comprehensive university in Wuhan in the latest month were analyzed. 10 college students who were members of that WeChat group were interviewed. The interview was related to their inner activities when using impoliteness expressions and what factors could influence their use of impoliteness expressions. The results showed that college students were more likely to use motivated impoliteness, informational impoliteness and strategic impoliteness. College students’ use of impolite-ness expressions were influenced by gender, social status and the relationship between the speaker and the hearer. The paper could provide a new study area for researchers. It will attract researchers’ attention on the use of impo-lite language, especially among different roles of people in society.


Introduction
Politeness expression has been a field of particular interest for scholars in China and abroad for many years.Politeness expression plays an important part in our social life.If we can use politeness expression well in social life, we can achieve success in most occasions [1].The fact is that the two situations most people can encounter are politeness and impoliteness.The researches on relevant concepts of politeness expressions have made great contributions.They can make people have a clear understanding of what is politeness and how to distinguish them with impoliteness.But as an independent language form, impoliteness expressions need to be further studied because of their short history and inadequate researches.
This paper aims at analyzing college students' use of impoliteness expression in the WeChat diction.It is supposed to answer the following questions: 1) Among the four categories of impoliteness expressions, which categories are college students more likely to use in WeChat diction?
2) What are the social factors that affect college students' use of impolite expressions?

Literature Review
Politeness expression plays a big part in our lives.Geng (1998) argues that if we can use politeness expression well in social life, we can achieve success in most occasions.The fact is that the two situations most people can encounter are politeness and impoliteness.To further study college students' use of impoliteness expression in the WeChat diction, the most relevant researches and works to this study are reviewed, including relevant concepts of politeness expressions, together with the meaning and employment of impoliteness expressions.

Relevant Concepts of Politeness Expressions
Paying attention to politeness is a common phenomenon in verbal communication [2].Pragmatic factors play an important role in affecting politeness behavior.Many Chinese researchers have done deep researches about how pragmatic factors influence politeness expressions.From inspection and analysis, Geng (1998) held that the pragmatic factors that affect the politeness of speech mainly include social factors, cultural factors, psychological factors and linguistic factors.The relationship between two speakers can be changed by different factors and the speakers' language will be different accordingly.Whether the speech is suitable for politeness depends on whether the chosen words are suitable for the relationship between the speakers [3].Politeness language not only reflects the norms of words and morality in a particular society, but also is an integral part of a specific language system [4] [5].
Pragmatic distance principle is also an indispensible factor in affecting politeness expressions.The language used by the speaker in the specific communicative behavior is the reflection of the specific pragmatic distance between the speaker and the receiver [6].The higher the degree is of pragmatic intimacy between the two parties, the lower the requirement of linguistic politeness is, and vice versa.Therefore, the essence of discourse politeness is the appropriateness of discourse to the degree of pragmatic intimacy between communicative parties [7].
The researches on relevant concepts of politeness expressions have made great contributions.They can make people have a clear understanding of what is po-liteness and how to distinguish them with impoliteness.But as an independent language form, impoliteness expressions need to be further studied.

The Development of Impoliteness Research
The beginning of impoliteness research is originated from politeness study.In the past, domestic academic professors paid more attention to polite expressions.The occasional mention of impolite language was also from the point of view of how to use impolite language to promote the politeness of speech act.Although, as Leech points out, "conflictive illocutions tend, thankfully, to be rather marginal to human linguistic behavior in normal circumstances", there are contexts in which conflictive illocutions are rather more central.In real life, people sometimes have to use impolite expressions on purpose in order to make the conversation atmosphere more relaxing, let the relationship between them and the other side closer or to express their sarcasm and dissatisfaction [8], which makes the study of impoliteness expressions become very important.
Unlike politeness expressions, there aren't many researches about impoliteness studies.The study of impoliteness expressions has a short history.The first research of impoliteness behavior began in the 1980s [9].The use of impolite language belongs to the phenomenon of "conflict discourse" [10].Kienpointer, M. (1997) distinguished overt discourtesy and covert discourtesy [11].Impolite language tools are characterized by system, tactic and cultural diversity.The model and method of impoliteness research are put forward [12].Culpeper, J. (2011) discussed the forms and theoretical basis of the bad manners in English.By absorbing the research results of pragmatics and social psychology, Culpeper (2011) also analyzed the operation mechanism of impolite speech behavior [13].One limitation of Culpeper (1996) is that it is focused rather too narrowly on single impoliteness strategies, usually made up of particular grammatical or lexical items [14].

Explanations of Impoliteness Expressions
Generally speaking, people's bad manners are manifested as impolite behavior and impolite words.Impolite behavior refers to the uncivilized behavior that violates the basic social morality and etiquette, such as spitting and littering.Impolite expression refers to the impolite language content or form in communication [15].I mainly talk about impoliteness expression in this paper.Impoliteness expression means the use of strategies that are designed to attack face and thereby cause social conflict and disharmony [12].Impoliteness refers to a negative attitude towards certain behaviors in a specific context [16].Goffman (1967) suggests to us that there are three types of action which constitute a threat to face [17].Zhang (2009) divided impoliteness expressions into four categories, including motivated impoliteness, informational impoliteness, strategic and non-strategic impoliteness [8].Due to some specific reasons, speakers may express their thoughts and feelings in subtle or indirect ways, consciously or un-consciously.This phenomenon is called implication [18].From the perspective of interpersonal psychology, the problems in psychological communication are caused by the hearer's wrong understanding of the speaker's word when communicating information, emotional communication and ideological communication [19].Sometimes, impolite speech acts can also achieve the purpose of communication, and even achieve better communication effect than using polite language.The definition and classification of impolite language make full preparation for future pragmatic research of impolite language.

Factors that Influence Impoliteness Expressions
For the factors that influence the use of impoliteness expressions, studies in this area mostly point out that gender affects it to a large degree.Research shows that as early as childhood, men learn to think abstractly and they value behavior.
Women, on the other hand, tend to think more concretely and pay more attention to emotions and relationships with others [20].Men use more expletive words than women.Remarkably, both sexes use it more in same-sex groups than in heterosexual groups [21].Male conversation may include swearing, shouting, threats, and even insults, which can sometimes become a way of showing closeness [21].In our daily life, female words can better meet most people's face needs and be more polite than men's language, and women are more sensitive to language that may damage others' face than men.

Comment
As a new form of language developing under the advanced technology, studies that link Internet language with impoliteness expression are few and not profound enough, especially for the study of college students' Internet impolite language.Therefore, I conduct this research to perform further exploration to fill the research gap in this aspect.

Data Collection
Data is from the content of the chatting records of a large WeChat group with 134 members-Hubin 12 Housings' 2021 graduate Management group in a comprehensive university in Wuhan in the latest month.
Additionally, this study adopts in-depth interview to further explore why those students use impolite expressions and factors affecting their use of impoliteness expressions.I use Chinese version interview in order to avoid misunderstanding or ambiguity.The interview is conducted among members in the WeChat group mentioned above.The number of the interviewees is 10 in total.
Interviews are carried out individually face to face.In the process of the interview, I initiated the conversation by quoting the impoliteness expressions in the chatting records of the WeChat group.Interviews were conducted according to the interview outline prepared advance, but there were also occasions when I added some questions valuable inspired by answers of interviewees.Each interview lasts about 5 minutes.Every interview was recorded and after the interviews I used Xunfeitingjian APP to transcribe the recording content.

Research Procedure
Firstly, I transfer the content of the chosen WeChat group's chatting records into the form of files.It is important to keep the form of dialogue, which makes it easier to find out the impoliteness expression and its contexts.Then I read through the files first.According to the definitions of impoliteness expression and typical impolite words in our common sense, sentences with impoliteness expressions are picked out.During the process of judging whether the words are impolite, the context is referred to improve the accuracy of the judgement.Next, due to the standard of impoliteness expression classification [8], I classify impoliteness words having been picked out into four categories, including motivated impoliteness, informational impoliteness, strategic and non-strategic impoliteness.
From the transcription of interviews, the inner activities of students when they use impoliteness expressions are revealed.Furthermore, factors affecting their use of impoliteness expressions are explored.

Results and Discussion
From the analysis of the chatting records in the chosen WeChat group, it is found that among college students, motivated impoliteness, informational impoliteness and strategic impoliteness are common, while non-strategic impoliteness is rare in college students' daily communication.
Impoliteness expressions may be caused by the speaker's motivation.It is a direct attack on the face of the listener.In the chatting records of the WeChat group, this kind of impoliteness words are common, as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.
From these sentences, it is learned that the person who sent this message wanted to express her dissatisfaction towards those people who made the noise.The use of impoliteness expression is deliberately caused by the speaker and it caused a negative effect on the communication.In the chosen WeChat group, there are also many other impoliteness expressions belonging to this category, as shown in Figure 3.
Informational impoliteness can be further divided into conscious impoliteness and unconscious impoliteness from the perspective of the speaker.Additionally, it can be further divided into the outward impoliteness and the actual impoliteness from the perspective of the words' effect on the hearer.Conscious impoliteness means that the speaker consciously uses impoliteness expressions in   talking with others.Unconscious impoliteness means that the speaker consciously uses politeness expression in talking with the hearer.The aim of the speaker is to achieve a positive communication effect.However, the hearer considers it as impolite.
The outward impoliteness means that the words spoken by the speaker seems to be impolite, but it is polite to the hearer.The common example is that we tend to use some seemingly impolite expressions with people close to us.Those expressions aren't impolite to them.Instead, if we deliberately use politeness expressions in informal occasions when talking to people close to us, hearers will consider them as impolite.This is called the actual impoliteness.
In the analysis of the chatting records, it is found that students use more conscious impoliteness expressions, as shown in Figure 1.
When speakers use these impoliteness expressions, they consciously want to use impoliteness expressions and those expressions are impolite to the hearers obviously.As a result, they belong to conscious impoliteness and actual impoliteness expressions.
Strategic impoliteness means that speakers use impoliteness words as a pragmatic strategy.The main outcome of strategic impoliteness is the fulfillment of the speaker's intention.At the same time, some negative outcomes accompany with the use of strategic impoliteness expressions.The relationship between the speaker and the hearer may become tense.Strategic impoliteness has a set of specific implementation such as provocation, intimidation.This kind of impoliteness also appear in the chatting record of the chosen WeChat group.
For example, "If my take-out is stolen, I will definitely try to obtain the monitor and ruin the thief's reputation".In this sentence, the method of intimidation is used to achieve the aim of the speaker.In this case, it is more possible for the hearer to behave as the speaker expects.
Non-strategic impoliteness means that in many cases, speakers use impoliteness expressions on impulse or just to vent his feelings in a certain context.Furthermore, there is another occasion when the speaker isn't aware of his words are impolite or make the hearer uncomfortable, even hurts the hearer.The reason behind this occasion is that the speaker may not know the cultural background or the life experience of the hearer, thus causing the misunderstanding of the hearer.Such kind of impoliteness expression is called non-strategic impoliteness expression.There are several reasons which can explain why non-strategic impoliteness expressions are rare in college students.In a WeChat group, students are more careful with their expressions considering their own image in the mind of other members in the WeChat group.As a result, if students use impoliteness expressions, it is not on impulse but after careful consideration.Furthermore, there aren't great difference among graduate students' cultural background or life experience, as most graduate students are domestic, which reduces the possibility of misunderstanding among them.
The study will also find that gender, social status and the relationship between speakers and hearers are decisive factors for students to use impolite expressions or not.College students tend to use impoliteness expression more often with male than with female.This is because in most college students' minds, female students themselves are more polite.Additionally, female students are more sensitive than male students, which make speakers more careful with their words when talking with female students.And I feel that girls are polite to each other, they don't say that they have to fight, and girls are more cute, so they don't need to say very heavy words.

受访者 H
我使用不礼貌用语的话，女生可能会要稍微温柔一点，对于男生的话就 会更多地使用不礼貌用语。 I would probably have to be a little gentler with girls if I used rude words, and more so with guys.
On terms of the influence of the social status on the use of impoliteness expressions, it is found that college students tend to use less impoliteness expressions or no impoliteness expressions with people who have high social status or with the eldership.On the one hand, college students have been educated to respect the eldership, which is a traditional virtue of the Chinese nation.On the other hand, from the interview with college students, it is found that people with high social status themselves use less impoliteness words because of their high moral character.As a result, college students tend to use less impoliteness words with them.

Major Findings of the Research
From the analysis of the chatting record in Hubin 12 Housings' 2021 graduate Management group and interviews with students in this WeChat group, it is found that college students are more likely to use motivated impoliteness, informational impoliteness and strategic impoliteness.They seldom use non-strategic impoliteness.
On terms of the factors affecting college students' use of impoliteness expressions, gender, social status and the relationship between speakers and hearers greatly influence college students' use of impoliteness expressions.

Implications of the Research
The study provides new thoughts for the understanding of the oral communication of college students.We should realize that in oral communication, polite expressions are not always good.Proper use of impolite words is also necessary to make ourselves live comfortably.The study also provides a new study area for researchers.They will pay more attention to the use of impolite language, especially among different roles of people in society.

Limitations of the Research
Participants in this research are graduates in a WeChat group with 134 members.Because it is a WeChat group in female dormitories, the results may not be universal for all college students.Future studies can expand their participants and make the research more representative.age, or social status of the person you are talking with) 2) What are your inner activities when you use impoliteness expression in talking to others? 1) 你更倾向于和谁使用不礼貌用语？(考虑对方的性别，年龄，社会地位 等因素) 2) 当你使用不礼貌用语与别人讲话时，你的内心活动是怎样的？

FigureFigure 1 .
Figure note: I'd like to ask you if you've got the wrong takeout, it's a red grapefruit and bread.Trouble 308 near the dormitory sisters can gently drag the bench?It's nighttime.Are they renovating?Do any of you want to join us for milk tea? Figure 1.Participants talking about the noise.

Figure note :Figure 2 .
Figure note: Thank you, sister.I've borrowed it.I need a contact lens solution.Which one of you is using the hair dryer in the 1st floor corridor?Can you do it earlier?Everyone is resting at this hour.Can the administrator of @Yanzi take care of this matter the dormitories close to the hallway outlet are tortured every day just ready to go to bed or just fall asleep by the sound of the hair dryer can't sleep can you tell some students to stop blowing their hair in the hallway after 11:00 a.m.? Take some measures, think about it.Eleven o'clock is already very late.Going to bed after eleven o'clock is like staying up late.If you don't want to go to bed, you can't force others to stay up late with you, can you? Figure 2. Participants talking about the noise.

FigureFigure 3 .
Figure note: If it is a group of sisters took the words I really want to say really do not have to ha we wait for delivery also waited for a long time so cold day is also very hungry you this is a waste of our money and let us do not have to eat why ah.I think it's time to tell the school to put up surveillance cameras and fix what's broken.If I'd taken the takeout, I'd call the CCTV and make Ta look bad.What's wrong with him?Auntie said the security department can check the security cameras.Even the ones in the hallway?You can watch out for sneaky people around you.When do you have time to go together?You're a college student, can't you have some moral boundaries? Figure 3. Participants talking about the stealing.
，用不着说很重的话。 I tend to fight with the opposite sex and my boyfriend, but with the same sex because girls are more sensitive and less likely to say something heavy.
、想一下导师的用意，不会去 使用不礼貌用语。 I will consider the social status of the person I am talking to, and I will not use impolite language when talking to my tutor.Even if I am angry, I will reflect on why I am angry, think about my tutor's intentions, and will not go out of my way to use impolite language.受访者 B 和同龄人或比我小的可以使用不礼貌用语，这是一种社会规范，要对长 辈尊敬，和自己同龄的人就很随意。 It's a social norm to use rude language with people my age or younger than me, it's a social norm to be respectful to my elders, it's casual with people my own age.受访者 C 交流时，我会考虑对方的社会身份，比如导师、或级别比我高的人，我 会更礼貌。平辈之间不会顾虑太多。 When communicating, I will consider the social status of the other person, such as a mentor, or someone with a higher rank than me, and I will be more polite.Between peers I wouldn't worry too much.受访者 E 我的长幼意识比较强。一般跟长辈沟通还蛮顺畅，没有出现一定要用不 礼貌语言或者很愤怒的情况。 I have a strong sense of elders and children.Generally, communication with elders was pretty smooth and there were no instances where I had to use rude language or get very angry.The relationship between speakers and hearers also plays an important part in the use of impoliteness expressions of college students.Close friends use impolite words to each other more frequently, which is also a way to show closeness.Strangers mostly use polite words with each other.受访者 D 和同学会用不礼貌用语，因为感觉比较亲近。而和陌生人就会使用礼貌 用语。 With classmates, I would use impolite language because it feels closer.And with strangers, I would use polite language.