Understanding online advice-giving evaluations through the politeness evaluation model

Abstract

One of the most popular online sites where advice interactions routinely occur is Reddit. As a predominately public platform, Reddit users presumably extend beyond only registered contributors. Thus, it is important to examine Reddit advice outside of the interactional or discursive level (e.g., exploring perceptions from other audience types). To bridge this gap, an experiment was designed based on a previous study on Reddit advice-giving, which investigated how audiences might perceive and evaluate the quality of advice-giving formulations. This experiment contained both qualitative and quantitative measures. Both components of the experiment yielded significant and interesting findings, with each meriting an in-depth discussion on their own. This paper reports on the qualitative aspects of the experiment, where results show that evaluations of advice invoke various aspects of Spencer-Oatey and Kádár’s (2021. Intercultural politeness: Managing relations across cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) politeness evaluation model, highlighting the particular pragmatic issues that are important for the advice interaction. These results also show that the manipulation of rhetorical moves used during Reddit advice-giving have an effect on the saliency of different face sensitivities, with implications for how linguistic forms as realized in rhetorical moves might be connected to higher level pragmatic concepts (e.g., face), and cognitive perceptions of warmth and competence.