A decade of digital politeness: Systematic review of strategies, gaps, and impoliteness taxonomies (2015–2025)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30603/al.v11i2.7853Keywords:
Computer-mediated communication;, digital pragmatics; , impoliteness strategies; , politeness theory; , systematic literature reviewAbstract
Background: Although computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been widely adopted as a primary mode of human interaction, there has been no systematic synthesis comprehensively mapping research on politeness strategies in digital environments over the past decade. This lack of synthesis obscures theoretical trends, empirical gaps, and emerging constructs specific to digital pragmatics.
Aims: This systematic literature review aims to synthesize empirical studies on politeness strategies in CMC published between 2015–2025, identify dominant theoretical frameworks, catalogue the strategies documented across studies, and develop a taxonomy of CMC-specific impoliteness phenomena.
Methods: Following PRISMA 2020, studies were identified through a Scopus search restricted to publications from 2015 to 2025, followed by sequential database filtering and full-text eligibility review. The final corpus comprised 29 peer-reviewed studies, which were analyzed through narrative synthesis and a quality appraisal adapted from the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT).
Results: Three principal findings emerge. First, Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory dominates the field, appearing in 20 of the 29 studies reviewed, despite well-documented inadequacies in CMC contexts, evidencing a theoretical conservatism the review terms “framework inertia”. Second, positive politeness and bald-on-record strategies are the most robustly documented, yet platform informality frequently appeared to attenuate cultural hierarchy norms in the cases reviewed, a “platform-as-channel-mediator” effect unaccounted for by existing frameworks. Third, three CMC-specific impoliteness constructs, adversative (im)politeness, e-mpoliteness, and impoliteness resonance, collectively form the field’s first coherent taxonomy of digital-native face-attacking phenomena.
Implications: Theoretically, this review challenges universalist accounts of digital politeness and establishes that cultural context is constitutive, not incidental, to CMC pragmatic norms. Practically, findings necessitate platform-differentiated EFL/ESL pedagogy and community-norm-sensitive content moderation. Longitudinal design, cross-platform comparisons, and AI-mediated communication research constitute the field’s most urgent unaddressed agenda.
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