A Pragmatic Analysis of Criticism Strategies against Government Policies on Social Media in Jordan: A Gender-Based Investigation

This study presents a pragmatic analysis of the speech act of criticism as used on Facebook and Twitter against government policies in Jordan. It examines the effect of gender on the participants’ choice of criticism strategies. The data obtained comprises 300 public posts, comments, and tweets. An adapted version of Nguyen’s (2005) framework of criticism strategies is used to analyse the data. The results reveal that the most frequently used strategies by the writers of the posts, comments, and tweets are sarcasm, identification of a problem, grievance/complaint to God, and negative evaluation, respectively. The results also showcase that men and women use some criticism strategies differently: Men tend to make more use of expression of uncertainty and asking/presupposing while women tend to use grievance/complaint to Allah and emojis/pictures. The study shows how language used on social media is a strong indicator of the distrust in the government-citizen relationship evident in the writers’ expression of uncertainty about the government’s decisions. Keywords: Speech Act of Criticism, Media Discourse, Socio-Pragmatics, Government.