Impoliteness Culpeper, Jonathan
01/2011, Letnik:
v.Series Number 28
eBook
When is language considered 'impolite'? Is impolite language only used for anti-social purposes? Can impolite language be creative? What is the difference between 'impoliteness' and 'rudeness'? ...Grounded in naturally-occurring language data and drawing on findings from linguistic pragmatics and social psychology, Jonathan Culpeper provides a fascinating account of how impolite behaviour works. He examines not only its forms and functions but also people's understandings of it in both public and private contexts. He reveals, for example, the emotional consequences of impoliteness, how it shapes and is shaped by contexts, and how it is sometimes institutionalised. This book offers penetrating insights into a hitherto neglected and poorly understood phenomenon. It will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics and social psychology in particular.
This handbook comprehensively examines social interaction by providing a critical overview of the field of linguistic politeness and impoliteness. Authored by over 40 leading scholars, it offers a ...diverse and multidisciplinary approach to a vast array of themes that are vital to the study of interpersonal communication.
Both impoliteness and hate speech deal with offensive behaviour, yet it is also obvious that they are not exactly the same. This paper aims to tease out the similarities and differences. The first ...part concentrates on theorising by impoliteness and hate speech scholars, and thus takes a second-order perspective. It discusses the notions of face (largely overlooked in studies of hate speech), incitement (largely overlooked in studies of impoliteness) and intentionality (and related concepts) (examined in both studies of impoliteness and hate speech, though often without explicit connections to the other field). The second part of the paper, taking more of a first-order perspective, concentrates on the metapragmatics of the labels impoliteness and hate speech, which are approached through the terms impolite and hateful. Hateful, in comparison with impolite is characterised by more extreme behaviours, the emotion of hurt, and associations of prejudice. This part of the paper also provides a demonstration of what one can do with corpus-methods. Overall, it is hoped that this paper will promote theoretical synergies, and also greater awareness of the labels that are used.
•The first paper to compare and contrast impoliteness and hate speech.•Critically discusses the theoretical impact of the notions of face, incitement and intentionality.•Conducts a corpus-based analysis of the labels impolite and hateful, revealing first-order understandings.
This paper makes a contribution to the study of impoliteness. More particularly, it explores conventionalised impoliteness formulae and their basis. It taps into debates about whether impoliteness ...(or politeness, for that matter) can be inherent in expressions, and argues that there is a sense in which it can. An important foundation for this paper is
Terkourafi's (e.g. 2001, 2002) work on formulaic politeness expressions. However, it argues that Terkourafi's strong focus on the frequency of people's direct experience of linguistic expressions in specific contexts, whilst appropriate for politeness, does not entirely suit an account of conventionalised impoliteness formulae. Indirect experience of impoliteness, especially via metadiscourse, does much to shape what counts as impolite and thus what may be conventionalised as impolite. Such impoliteness metadiscourse is driven not only by the salience of impoliteness, but by the social dynamics of impoliteness itself. Finally, this paper proposes two methods for identifying conventionalised impoliteness formulae (one being akin to Terkourafi's method), and offers a preliminary list of such formulae in English.
Despite featuring prominently in religions and legal frameworks, and being discussed by anthropologists and sociologists in relation to rights and obligations in society, reciprocity has not received ...the attention it deserves in the (im)politeness literature. This article proposes and defines the Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity, which concerns the (mis)matching of (im)politeness across participants in interaction – something which can be construed in terms of a debit-credit balance sheet. We claim that this principle, driven by morality, is a fundamental mechanism in shaping (im)politeness in interaction and triggering the search for (im)politeness implicatures. We show how it impacts on various kinds of (im)politeness and interacts with context, especially power. The latter part of the article, focusing on requestive exchanges, is more quantitative in orientation, involving studies based on informant testing and corpus analysis. These reveal, for example, that (im)politeness matching is by far the most common interaction, that mismatches are perceived as clear deviations, and that certain kinds of (mis)matching are associated with specific contexts (e.g. school classroom interaction is associated with downward shifts from polite to less polite). Finally, we briefly discuss future research avenues.
•The Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity is proposed.•Morality is claimed to be fundamental to (im)politeness reciprocity.•How reciprocity shapes interactions and triggers (im)politeness implicatures is revealed.•How reciprocity impacts on and interacts with context, especially power, is revealed.•How reciprocity works in the context of requestive exchanges is revealed.
The notion of “culture” must surely stand as one of the most controversial, most difficult to define concepts in academia. Such are the problems that one is tempted to evade the concept altogether. ...And if one is brave enough to pursue the concept, there lingers the suspicion that the concept is fatally flawed. Consider, for example, Sarangi’s (2009, 87) point, as noted in the introduction to this volume, that “any definition of culture is necessarily reductionist.” That raises the issue of whether it is worthwhile pursing research that has such a reductionist category as culture at its heart. In fact, in my view any kind of research that involves analysis is – perhaps by definition – reductionist. Analysis involves reducing phenomena to analytical categories by identifying commonalities amongst them. Perhaps the point here is that culture as a category it particularly reductionist. However, even that rather depends on how one defines culture and operationalizes it. This is where it is particularly instructive to consider how the papers in this volume have handled this issue.
This innovative volume testifies to the current revived interest in Shakespeare's language and style and opens up new and captivating vistas of investigation. Transcending old boundaries between ...literary and linguistic studies, this engaging collaborative book comes up with an original array of theoretical approaches and new findings. The chapters in the collection capture a rich diversity of points of view and cover such fields as lexicography, versification, dramaturgy, rhetorical analyses, cognitive and computational corpus-based stylistic studies, offering a holistic vision of Shakespeare's uses of language. The perspective is deliberately broad, confronting ideas and visions at the intersection of various techniques of textual investigation. Such novel explorations of Shakespeare's multifarious artistry and amazing inventiveness in his use of language will cater for a broad range of readers, from undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars and researchers, to poetry and theatre lovers alike.
Building on Culpeper (1996) & Culpeper et al. (2003), I first propose a new definition of impoliteness & general revisions to my model of impoliteness, both derived from data analyses. Given that my ...particular data in this paper, The Weakest Link, is a television entertainment quiz show, I will briefly account for why impoliteness might be entertaining. As a backdrop to my micro-analyses of interactions, I discuss the nature of "exploitative" chat & game shows, & I examine the structure of The Weakest Link & how it maximizes the potential for face-damage. In my analyses, I show the formulaic & creative nature of parts of the discourse & also how analyzing prosody is key to understanding the impoliteness. I pay special attention to "off-record impoliteness," sarcasm & mimicry, & I integrate into my model Spencer-Oatey's (2002) revisions of Brown & Levinson's (1987) concepts of negative & positive face. Finally, referring to Levinson's (1992) "activity types," I consider whether the context of the quiz show "neutralizes" the "impoliteness." I argue that the salience of "impolite" signals engulf the context, with the result that targets often take offense in contexts where they theoretically should not. 3 Tables, 7 Figures, 52 References. Adapted from the source document
Pragmatics: Data trends Culpeper, Jonathan; Gillings, Mathew
Journal of pragmatics,
20/May , Letnik:
145
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper identifies the trends in the data used in pragmatics studies over the last 20 years, and thereby makes predictions about how pragmatics might develop in the next few years, other things ...being equal. To establish those trends, 200 papers from the Journal of Pragmatics, covering the period 1999 to 2018, were categorised. The categorisation scheme was designed to capture some of the key ways in which data in pragmatics varies, and included: the general focus of the paper (e.g. whether it is data-driven), the focal point in the data of the analysis, the quantity of the data, the medium of the data, the number of modes or channels represented in the data, the degree of interactivity of the data, the fictionality of the data, and the language of the data (specifically whether it only contains English). Trends discovered include: a continual strong focus on data, a shift of analytical focus towards more macro units, increasing use of greater quantities of data, decreasing dominance of purely spoken data, increasing use of multimodal data, increasing use of more interactive data, decreasing use of constructed examples, no increasing use of fictional data, and the continual diversification of the languages treated.
•Pragmatics continues to be strongly linked to data, especially “real” data.•Pragmatics is shifting its analytical focus towards more macro, contextual units.•Pragmatics is engaging datasets of increasing size, though still avoids the very largest corpora.•Pragmatics is less dominated by purely spoken data, increasingly using multimodal data and digital media data, though the use of more interactive, dialogic data is increasing.•Pragmatics continues to diversify the range of languages it treats.
This paper explores keywords, key part-of-speech categories and key semantic categories and their role in text analysis. The first part of the paper addresses a set of issues relating to the ...definition of keywords and their history, the settings used in deriving keywords, the choice of reference corpora, the different kinds of keyword that emerge in one’s results and the dispersion of keywords in one’s data. It argues, amongst other things, that keywords are the same as style markers, and that three types of keyword can be identified: interpersonal, textual and ideational. The second part of the paper addresses the question of what precisely is to be gained from analysing key part-of-speech or key semantic domains in addition to keywords. It shows that whilst in general they add little to a keyword analysis, which is in any case methodologically more robust, there are some significant specific benefits. Answers to many of the questions posed in this paper are illustrated by a study of character-talk from Shakespeare’s play
Romeo and Juliet
, and in this way this paper also makes a contribution to the fledging field of corpus stylistics.
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