“Reasonable Hostility”: Situation-appropriate face-attack
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Karen Tracy
Abstract
In this paper I argue for a different standard to assess the quality of communicative conduct in local governance meetings. Rather than seeing public talk occasions as needing politeness or civility, a better norm, I suggest, is “reasonable hostility”. Emotionally marked criticism of the past and future actions of public persons (i. e., reasonable hostility), I show, is necessary for the able functioning of democratic bodies. Following a critique of politeness theories, including a claim for why Goffman's concept of face is more suitable for exploring situated communicative practices, background on U.S. school governance practices and the particular U.S. school board meetings that are the focus of this paper are provided. Then, I illustrate and analyze recurrent, ordinary kinds of face-attack that occurred in the community's public meetings and provide evidence that meeting participants judged the remarks to be face-attacking. In the paper's concluding section, I describe the situation and face-attack features that distinguish reasonable hostility from unreasonable forms.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Impoliteness: Eclecticism and Diaspora An introduction to the special edition
- “Reasonable Hostility”: Situation-appropriate face-attack
- Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces
- Participants' orientations to interruptions, rudeness and other impolite acts in talk-in-interaction
- Impoliteness and emotional arguments
- The pragmatics of swearing
- Rudeness, conceptual blending theory and relational work
- Sociopragmática y Retórica Interpersonal: La Cortesía en Inglés y Castellano. [Interpersonal Sociopragmatics and Rhetoric: Politeness in British English and Spanish], by John A. G. Ardila
- Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French, by Kate Beeching
- Terms of (Im) Politeness: A Study of the Communicational Properties of Traditional Chinese (Im) Polite Terms of Address, by Dániel Z. Kádár
- Sarcasm and Other Mixed Messages: The Ambiguous Way People Use Language, by Patricia Ann Rockwell
- Contributors
Articles in the same Issue
- Impoliteness: Eclecticism and Diaspora An introduction to the special edition
- “Reasonable Hostility”: Situation-appropriate face-attack
- Impoliteness and ethnicity: Māori and Pākehā discourse in New Zealand workplaces
- Participants' orientations to interruptions, rudeness and other impolite acts in talk-in-interaction
- Impoliteness and emotional arguments
- The pragmatics of swearing
- Rudeness, conceptual blending theory and relational work
- Sociopragmática y Retórica Interpersonal: La Cortesía en Inglés y Castellano. [Interpersonal Sociopragmatics and Rhetoric: Politeness in British English and Spanish], by John A. G. Ardila
- Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French, by Kate Beeching
- Terms of (Im) Politeness: A Study of the Communicational Properties of Traditional Chinese (Im) Polite Terms of Address, by Dániel Z. Kádár
- Sarcasm and Other Mixed Messages: The Ambiguous Way People Use Language, by Patricia Ann Rockwell
- Contributors
