Indonesian and Japanese Impoliteness on X: A Corpus-Based Comparison with Pedagogical Implications
https://doi.org/10.54012/ijcer.v5i2.907
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Keywords:
Contrastive pragmatics, Conventionalized impoliteness formulae, Implicational impoliteness, Japanese language education, Pragmatic awareness, Online political discourseAbstract
Few studies have compared how Indonesian and Japanese social media users express impoliteness toward their governments. This study coded 50 Indonesian replies on X to a post by the news outlet Tempo about the Free Nutritious Meals program and 50 Japanese replies to a post by the governing Liberal Democratic Party about measures against rising prices. Because the two posts differ in source and topic, the results describe these two corpora rather than the two languages as a whole. Conventionalized impoliteness formulae and implicational impoliteness, following Culpeper (2011), were coded at the segment level and compared at the reply level with Fisher's exact tests and Holm correction. Pointed criticisms/complaints was the only category that differed significantly, appearing in 58% of the Japanese and 24% of the Indonesian replies (adjusted p = .008). Insults were more frequent in the Indonesian replies (34% vs. 16%), but the difference was not significant after correction. In an exploratory comparison, implicational strategies appeared in more Indonesian than Japanese replies (68% vs. 46%). The Japanese replies mainly criticized the government's actions explicitly. The discussion considers how such authentic replies could support pragmatics instruction for Indonesian learners of Japanese.
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