Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT) 2011

March 10 - 13, 2011
Washington, DC
View the conference website.

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Fatsos on Cell Phones vs. Lance Armstrong Wannabes: A Corpus-Based Examination of Impoliteness on the Internet
This study takes online disagreements between urban cyclists and drivers as a starting point to investigate impoliteness in computer-mediated discourse. A corpus of over 20,000 words was collected from the comment threads of relevant blog posts on voices.washingtonpost.com, consisting of reader reactions to news items about cyclists and drivers. Each post was tagged for point of view (cyclist, non-partisan, or driver) and politeness (impolite, face-neutral, or polite). Word and n-gram frequency analyses were performed, and the results analyzed qualitatively to investigate the underlying ideology of each position. The final analysis shows how impoliteness is used to express group affiliation.

Presenter: Daniel Ginsberg
Saturday, March 12, 2011
11:15 – 11:40 am
ICC 101

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