TRASH TALKS AND DEFENSIVE RESPONSES ON NIGERIAN SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM: A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

The advent of social media has given a majority, if not all, of its users the privilege to use it and engage in it in diverse ways, including posting and commenting on contents. One of which is to use language in many ways including to praise, appreciate, criticise or even to defame contents posted on social media. Trash talks or trash comments have become one of the ways social media users engage in media contents to criticise, defame or discriminate the persons or content in which they are directed. On the Nigerian media spaces, netizens have engaged in “trash talks”. For the study’s analysis I focus on a subsection of posts: pre-wedding pictures posts. The present study examined trash talks or comments and their attendant defensive responses in pre-wedding posts on social Tik Tok media space. Three pre-wedding pictures posts were collected, and trash comments and defensive responses were purposively sampled from each post for analysis. Brown and Levinson Politeness and Jonathan Culpepper impoliteness frameworks were employed in the analysis save or harm “face”. The analysis focuses on the language used of trash talks or comments on social media posts, and the attended posters’ responses as well as the negotiation of social identities by the posters.