Impoliteness

Jūratė Ruzaitė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
jurate.ruzaite@vdu.lt

Opinions can be expressed in polite and impolite ways, with the latter being best understood from the perspective of impoliteness theory. Regarding impoliteness, an important shift occurred in the mid-1990s and later when, instead of being viewed as a politeness failure, it began to be regarded as a strategic and deliberate use of impolite forms. In this framework, impoliteness is defined as the use of conventionalised impoliteness formulae that are typically employed to cause social disruption instead of promoting social harmony.

The roots of impoliteness theories can be traced back to politeness theories, which assumed that impoliteness is a result of a failure to be polite (rather than a consequence of intentional measures) and that politeness is universal (that is unified across cultures and languages). As a reaction to this approach to politeness, a group of scholars dealing with impolite verbal behaviour launched a new approach, a discursive analysis of impoliteness, which assumes (1) that impoliteness may be intentional or non-intentional, (2) that it is community-specific and guided by social norms, (3) it is based on internal perspectives of the interlocutors (rather than filtered through the researcher’s/observer’s perspective), i.e. the interlocutors decide themselves, through a ‘discursive struggle’, what is and what is not impolite in a situated discourse in which they participate, and thus (3) impoliteness is negotiable.

Impoliteness includes interactive strategies aimed at attacking face, and those deliberately leading to conflictive communication. Being directly related to conflict, language aggression, and intentionally disruptive behaviour, impoliteness is associated with hate speech and can serve as a useful category in hate speech identification.

The following types of conventional impoliteness formulae are distinguished: insults (personalised negative vocatives, personalised negative assertions, personalised negative references, and personalised third-person negative references), pointed criticism, challenging or unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions, condescensions, message enforcers, dismissals, silencers, threats, and negative expressives.

Keywords: conventionalised impoliteness formulae, face, politeness theory

Related Entries: Hedging, Incivility (1), Incivility (2), Slurs

References:
Culpeper, J. (1996). Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 25(3), 349–367. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(95)00014-3
Culpeper, J. (2010). Conventionalised impoliteness formulae. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(12), 3232–3245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.05.007
Culpeper, J. (2011a). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, J. (2011b). Politeness and impoliteness. In K. Aijmer & G. Andersen (Eds.), Sociopragmatics (pp. 391–436). (Handbooks of Pragmatics 5). De Gruyter Mouton.
Culpeper, J., Iganski, P., & Sweiry, A. (2017). Linguistic impoliteness and religiously aggravated hate crime in England and Wales. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 5(1), 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.5.1.01cul