Analyzing Politeness Strategies in Pakistani Digital Spaces: A Case Study of Localized Foodpanda Customer Reviews

Abstract

The present qualitative research is an empirical investigation into the pragmatic use of politeness strategies by Pakistani consumers within online review spaces specifically focusing on local service-oriented platform, Foodpanda. The current study is grounded in the notion of Politeness Theory by Brown and Levinson (1987) with special attention paid to their fundamental concept of face-threatening acts (FTAs). Based on their framework, the current study attempts to investigate the use of positive politeness, negative politeness, bald on-record strategy, and off-record indirectness within consumer reviews and complaints written in English, Urdu, and Roman Urdu. Using purposively selected data of about 50 online reviews, the current study applies qualitative discourse analysis for examining the deployment of politeness super strategies according to positive, negative, and mixed sentiments. The results show that the use of positive politeness prevails, constituting about 65% of all reviewed data in all platforms studied. The off-record indirect politeness strategy occurs mostly in code-switched reviews between English and Roman Urdu. Importantly, this dataset reveals how Pakistan-based reviewers use a particular type of hybrid pragmatic register, which mixes the pragmatic conventions of English with the honorifics of Urdu, appeals to collective identity found in Urdu, and the discourses of Islam, thus challenging the assumption of individuality and Universalism associated with Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness. There are two main contributions this study makes: a theoretical one – by presenting evidence in favor of cultural calibration of models of politeness; and a practical one – by informing platform localization and customer experience strategies.