Abstract
In Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence, Jonathan Culpeper provides a cutting-edge scholarly account of how impolite behaviour works. The author offers us a deep insight into its definition, forms and functions, and the emotional responses to impoliteness, with analysis of a wide range of natural language data sources including diary reports, the Oxford English Corpus, dialogue on TV game shows and chat shows, a documentary about army recruit training, and graffiti on desks. Grounded in related theories of linguistic pragmatics and social psychology, this book adds to the growing scholarship on politeness and impoliteness.
In Chapter 1, the author first reviews the commonalities in prior scholars’ definition of impoliteness, then comes to his own delimitation of it, which consists of the following components: violating the hearer’s social norm-based expectation, causing offence or emotional consequences, and other factors affecting the perceptions of the hearer including the speaker’s intentionality. The author uses Helen Spencer-Oatey’s rapport management categories to probe into types of offence among five different cultures (British, Chinese, Finnish, German, Turkish).
Chapter 2 focuses on key concepts constituting the notion of impoliteness, and intentionality and emotion, the former somehow downplayed and the latter emphasized for their respective role in evaluating impoliteness. The author then categorizes the emotional perceptions of impoliteness and puts forward an integrated socio-cognitive model of understanding impoliteness.
Chapter 3 studies impoliteness metalanguage/metadiscourse with the corpus methodology, revealing the frequency and genre of such metalinguistic labels as rude, inappropriate, aggressive and impolite in academia, and proposes a mapping of impoliteness metalinguistic labels in conceptual space. The author then distinguishes impoliteness metalinguistic comments from metalinguistic expressions by considering the case of over-politeness, and formulates impoliteness metapragmatic rules both in public and private settings.
In Chapter 4, the author argues that impoliteness is partly inherent in linguistic expressions and examines relatively context-spanning conventionalized impoliteness expressions like threats, swear words and insults. The author then proposes that conventionalized impoliteness formulae vary according to three scales: the degree of conventionalization, the extent to which they are context-dependent, and the degree of offence they are associated with. The last section of this chapter discusses two ways of intensifying the conventionalized impoliteness formulae, that is, through message intensity and non-verbal, especially prosodic, intensification.
Chapter 5 examines implicational impoliteness, focusing on its linguistic triggers. The author distinguishes between three types of impolite implicatures. The first type, form-driven impoliteness, is triggered by formal surface or semantic aspects of behaviour and has negative consequences for certain individuals. The typical cases are innuendo, snide remarks and mocking mimicry. The second type of implicational impoliteness is convention-driven. Its linguistic triggers involve the context projected conventionally by the behaviour trigger mismatching either the context projected by another part of the behaviour (an internal mismatch) or the context of use (an external mismatch). They cover everyday notions such as sarcasm. The third type of implicational impoliteness is context-driven. Its triggers involve whether behaviour is unmarked or altogether absent in contexts where it is clearly expected – it mismatches contextual expectations.
Chapter 6 discusses the effects of co-text and context in interpreting impoliteness events. The author considers the event contexts where impoliteness is in some sense habitual or normal. The author then examines the recontextualization of conventionalized impoliteness formulae, with the result that they are construed as mock rather than genuine impoliteness.
Chapter 7 describes the functions of impoliteness and, more specifically, impoliteness events. The author illustrates three key functions with a detailed analysis of a natural text. The first kind, affective function, involves ‘the targeted display of heightened emotion, typically anger, with the implication that the target is to blame for producing that negative emotional state’ (p. 223). The second type is coercive impoliteness that seeks a realignment of values between the speaker and the hearer, such that the speaker benefits or has their current benefits reinforced or protected. The third type is entertaining impoliteness which seeks to entertain the third-party audience at the expense of the target of the impoliteness event. The author proposes five sources of pleasure and suggests that the way to get aesthetic pleasure is through linguistic creativity. The author also discusses the institutional impoliteness which is guided by the speaker’s collective intentions of keeping the institutional ideology unchallenged.
Chapter 8 concludes the book by returning to the definition of impoliteness, covering the main points the author has discussed and including a summary table of impoliteness strategies and formulae discussed in the book. The author also points out the potential for future research, especially the diachronic study of impoliteness both on a personal and a community level.
This book gives a thorough and systemic analysis of linguistic impoliteness in interactions. The book deserves a wide readership for two reasons. First, the book fills a gap in interpersonal politeness studies and, second, it approaches impoliteness with detailed analyses drawing on different perspectives such as schema theory, relevance theory and rapport management theory. All in all, this book is an engaging and valuable contribution to linguistic politeness theory. Pragmaticians, social psychologists, corpus linguists, students of English language learning, and many others will find this work stimulating and insightful.