(Im)politeness and conversational humour in a multicultural society: Exploring new media and real-life contexts

Objective

In an increasingly interconnected world, harmonious intercultural communication is imperative, particularly within multicultural societies. This project aims to investigate the intricate interplay between linguistic (im)politeness and conversational humour in multicultural contexts. It focuses on instances of intercultural humour leading to offence in new media and real-life interactions. Furthermore, it explores the reciprocal influence of real-life and new media interactions on intercultural humour and offence dynamics. To achieve these objectives, a dual-method approach encompassing micro-level interactional pragmatics and macro-level corpus pragmatics and will be used. The data will be drawn from social media and authentic real-life conversations. The findings will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of (im)politeness and conversational humour in a multicultural context and will aid in the development of comprehensive theories regarding these pragmatic phenomena. These findings will also have substantial implications for policymakers, educators, broadcasters, and the general public.