The role of prosody and gesture in the perception of mock impoliteness

Abstract

Within the impoliteness literature, an important distinction has beenmade between genuine and mock (or non-genuine) impoliteness (Culpeper1996, 2011; Bernal 2008, among others). Even though mock impoliteness hasgenerally been analyzed within an impoliteness framework, recent proposalssuggest that it is an essentially different pragmatic phenomenon that requiresa continuous conversational evaluation (Haugh and Bousfield 2012). Thepresent study had the goal of assessing the offline evaluation process of targetgenuine vs. mock impoliteness utterances, specifically the role the situational/discourse contexts, as well as prosodic and gestural patterns, play in their interpretation.A total of 97 participants were either asked to rate the degree ofimpoliteness of target genuine and mock impoliteness utterances in isolation(Experiment 1), or to rate the same utterances preceded with a set of matchedand mismatched situational/discourse contexts which favored either a genuineor a mock impoliteness interpretation (Experiment 2). The results of the twoexperiments show that (a) evaluations of intended mock impoliteness utterancesgenerate more uncertainty in listeners than intended genuine impolite utterances;and (b) mock impoliteness evaluations are characterized by a moreactive use of gestural cues. These results provide evidence that mock impolitenesstriggers a more complex evaluation procedure of a phenomenon that lieson the boundary between polite and impolite behavior.