Impoliteness, preference organization and conducivity

Abstract

Traditional approaches to politeness (e. g. Brown and Levinson 1987) and impoliteness (e. g. Culpeper 1996 and Lachenicht 1980), rarely consider the effects of their face-oriented strategies outside of the context of a single turn. While Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann (2003) do consider both how impoliteness pans out in extended discourse and the role of prosody in conveying impoliteness, what's not considered are the effects that manipulating or exploiting interactant expectations through the exploitation of specific turn-taking mechanisms can have in the production of impolite face damaging utterances. The broad aim of this paper is to explore the role in impoliteness production of one such mechanism, Preference Organization (see Sacks 1992), which, when coupled with the concept of Conducivity in questions (see Quirk et al. 1985), can give rise to extremely powerful face damaging acts and act sequences. More specifically, the paper will consider and discuss the dynamic verbal interplay between individuals using preference organization and conducivity pragmatically for impolite purposes within such confrontational discourses as car-parking disputes, military training programmes and within restaurant kitchens. The conclusions drawn here with impoliteness will have important implications for politeness theories in particular and for discourse and conflict resolution studies in general.