Abstract
This paper investigates linguistic and non-linguistic markers of negative evaluations of situated behaviours, termed impoliteness (Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. In Drew Paul, Marjorie H. Goodwin, John J. Gumpertz & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Studies in interactional linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The paper takes an interactional pragmatic approach to a fixed institutional setting (a courtroom) to investigate how (not why) a series of reprimands and sanctions unfolded. It shows that the key participants, the judge and the defendant, orient to separate interactional cues from their unshared overhearing audiences (their unshared contexts), whilst orienting to each other’s institutional interaction turns (their shared context). This paper suggests that their contexts create competing architectures of intersubjectivity, termed duelling contexts, because the participants are not co-locative (in separate rooms connected through closed circuit TV).
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Associate Professor Ilana Mushin (UQ) for her unending support and guidance through the writing of this paper. I also wish to thank the reviewers for their critique and thought-provoking insight into some of the ideas addressed in earlier versions of this paper. I hope that my revisions have cleared up any outstanding misunderstandings. All errors are my own.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial: where we have been and where we are going
- Research Articles
- Euphemism in laxative TV commercials: at the crossroads between politeness and persuasion
- Teachers and supervisors negotiating face during critical account requests in post observation feedback
- Politeness as normative, evaluative and discriminatory: the case of verbal hygiene discourses on correct honorifics use in South Korea
- Duelling contexts: how action misalignment leads to impoliteness in a courtroom
- Sassy Sasha?: The intersectionality of (im)politeness and sociolinguistics
- Politeness in professional contexts: foreign-language teacher training
- Twitter and the Real Academia Española: perspectives on impoliteness
- I wanted to honour your journal, and you spat in my face: emotive (im)politeness and face in the English and Russian blind peer review
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial: where we have been and where we are going
- Research Articles
- Euphemism in laxative TV commercials: at the crossroads between politeness and persuasion
- Teachers and supervisors negotiating face during critical account requests in post observation feedback
- Politeness as normative, evaluative and discriminatory: the case of verbal hygiene discourses on correct honorifics use in South Korea
- Duelling contexts: how action misalignment leads to impoliteness in a courtroom
- Sassy Sasha?: The intersectionality of (im)politeness and sociolinguistics
- Politeness in professional contexts: foreign-language teacher training
- Twitter and the Real Academia Española: perspectives on impoliteness
- I wanted to honour your journal, and you spat in my face: emotive (im)politeness and face in the English and Russian blind peer review