Panel 1: New sources, new media
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09:20 - 10:10
​Sarah Almutairi
09:20 - 09:45
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Key words
Saudi) Arabic, speech acts, disagreement, Twitter, (im)politeness
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Biography
I hold a BA in English Language and Literature from Saudi Arabia and an MA in Linguistics from the University of Manchester. Currently, I am doing my Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Leeds. I worked as a Teaching Assistant at a University in Saudi Arabia for a year and a half before coming to Leeds.
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Supervisor(s)
Dr. Bethan Davies and Prof. El Mustapha Lahlali
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Disagreement and (Im)politeness in Saudi’s Tweets in Political and Social Hashtags
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This Ph.D. project aims to investigate Saudi users’ practices on Twitter, specifically how they express and evaluate disagreement and (im)politeness when discussing social and political issues. In the last few years, Saudi Arabia has undergone many major societal and governmental changes, which has opened doors for debating these transformations. According to the social media report by Salem (2017), Twitter is one of the most commonly used social media platforms in Saudi Arabia. Compared to other Arab countries, Saudi Arabia has the highest number of active users on Twitter. These users produce around 274 million tweets per month, this illustrates the popularity of microblogging among Saudis. Pak and Paroubek (2010) describe microblogging platforms like Twitter as ‘valuable source of people’s opinions and sentiment’ (p.1320). Twitter is not just a place for sharing information or posting daily updates, but it is also a place where people express their views.
However, language use on Twitter, particularly (im)politeness, is under-studied despite its prominence in communication (Culpeper et al., 2017). Similarly, the literature on disagreement and (im)politeness in mediated communication in Arabic is still thin (Harb, 2016). Therefore, the study aims to provide an intralingual and intracultural account of disagreement and (im)politeness on Twitter within the Saudi context. It seeks to address the need for a thorough examination of the linguistic variations that Saudi participants exhibit when disagreeing on Twitter. This is significant to better understand the influence of the medium on Saudis’ linguistic and communicating practices. Such research may help future cross-cultural and cross-dialectal studies on online disagreement and (im) politeness.
At this stage, the focus is placed on defining disagreement online (e-disagreement), the main characteristics and types of disagreement expressions, identifying disagreement on Twitter, how disagreement was perceived in politeness studies and how culture/context specific studies support non-negative views of disagreement.
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Culpeper, J., Haugh, M. and Kádár, D.Z. 2017. The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im) politeness. Springer. Harb, M.A. 2016. Attending to face in faceless computer-mediated communication:(IM) politeness in online disagreements among Arabic speakers. thesis, Ball State University.
Pak, A. and Paroubek, P. 2010. Twitter as a corpus for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. In: LREc, pp.1320-1326.
Salem, F. 2017. The Arab Social Media Report 2017: Social Media and the Internet of Things: Towards Data-Driven Policymaking in the Arab World. Dubai: MBR School of Government.
Electronic Literature in China: Chinese Internet Literature
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What is Chinese internet literature (CIL) and how it differentiates from western electronic literature?
From oral literature to written literature, and from printed literature to electronic literature, the way of how literature is created, preserved, disseminated and criticized is developing and modifying with time goes by. Unlike creative “electronic literature” (Hayles, 2008; The Electronic Literature Organization, 2019; et al) in western countries, which is highly bound to electronic media, eastern internet literature shows a successive trend although creativity is also exited. The new literary genre “Chinese internet literature” (Ouyang, 2008; Chen, 2009; Hocks, 2015; Shao, 2016; et al) shows strong growth momentum within the three decades of its development. CIL attracts not only Chinese readers but followers all around the world. It is no longer a piece of literary work for entertaining but a symbol of Chinese popular culture. However, the term “CIL” is still not familiar to lots of non-Chinese readers and its impact on e-lit and world literature has not been adequately explored and developed yet.
This paper aims to fill the gap of research. It presents comparison of CIL’s definitions to introduce it to international readers and discusses how it contribute to the development of electronic literature and world literature.
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Chen, H. 2009. Wang Luo Xiao Shuo De Xing Qi. Novel Review. 2009(3), pp. 31-35.
Hayles, N. K. 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame.
Hocks, M. 2015. Internet Literature in China. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ouyang, Y. 2008. Wang Luo Wen Xue Gai Lun. Beijing: Peking University Press.
Shao, Y. 2016. Wang Luo Wen Xue Jing Dian Jie Du. Beijing: Peking University Press.
The Electronic Literature Organization Website. 2019.