Volume 7, Issue 4 - Special issue on impoliteness

In this paper, I first look at how the notions of “politeness” and “impoliteness” have been discussed in the literature including my own ideas of relating universal levels of impoliteness to culture and language-specific levels. Given this framework and my earlier postulation of a set of dimensions along which German speakers were found to prefer expressions that are more direct than indirect, more explicit than implicit, and generally more content-oriented than addressee-oriented, I provide several examples of German speakers interacting with members of other cultures in everyday talk and academic advising sessions. In interpreting the results of the analyses of these interactions, I attempt to relate them to the concept of impoliteness, to German speakers' communicative preferences and to the distinction between an emic and an etic perspective.

This paper investigates cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness. It is based on 500 impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany, and Turkey. The main analytical framework adopted is Spencer-Oatey's (e.g. Rapport management: A framework for analysis, Continuum, 2000) “rapport management,” covering various types of face as well as sociality rights. We offer some clarifications of this framework, and explain and demonstrate how it can be operationalized for quantitative analysis. In general, it offers a good account of our data, though accommodating ambiguous cases proved to be a major challenge. Our quantitative analysis suggests that three of the five categories of Spencer-Oatey's framework are key ones, namely, quality face, equity rights, and association rights. Furthermore, differences between our geographically separated datasets emerge. For example, the England-based data has a preponderance of impoliteness events in which quality face is violated, whereas the China-based data has a preponderance where equity rights are violated. We offer some explanations for these differences, relating them where possible to broader cultural issues.

This paper employs a corpus-based approach to examine the bases of impoliteness via the nature of emotions involved in offending event(s), with a view of teasing apart face concerns from other factors in the management of relations. Drawing from (social) psychology, we consider how emotions can open a window on discerning what type of impolite acts they appear as responses to and what impolite acts they motivate. The occurrence of 20 emotion words in the narration of offensive events in the narrative genre of the METU Turkish Corpus are analyzed in terms of the bases of impoliteness with insights from the rapport management model (Spencer-Oatey, Journal of Pragmatics 34: 529–545, 2002, Journal of Politeness Research 1: 95–119, 2005, Journal of Pragmatics 39: 639–656, 2007). The analysis reveals links between certain emotion categories and face, sociality rights and values. The study ends with the discussion of two sample extracts from the data for the identification of the components of the script-like nature of emotions in impoliteness.

In recent years, researchers have explored politeness and impoliteness extensively and have attempted to construct theoretical frameworks that would account for both phenomena. Research on im-politeness focuses almost exclusively on linguistic performance and investigates the phenomena in relation to the behavior of individuals in verbal interaction (see Brown and Levinson, Politeness: Some universals in language usage, Cambridge University Press, 1987 [Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena, Cambridge University Press, 1978]; Leech, Principles of pragmatics, Longman, 1983; Spencer-Oatey, Rapport management: A framework for analysis, Continuum, 2000; Mills, Gender and politeness, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Watts, Politeness, Cambridge University Press, 2003 among others). Departing from this line of investigation, in our paper, we consider im-politeness as broad phenomena that involve verbal and/or non-verbal means of expression and manifest themselves primarily at a societal level. The main aim of the paper is to explore how young Greeks conceptualize im-politeness and to briefly consider whether these perceptions have changed in the last 25 years. Another aim of the paper is to investigate whether our informants believe that their society has become more or less polite than it used to be and to delve into the reasons to which they may attribute this change. Our findings indicate that our informants view impoliteness as being different in nature from, but not the polar opposite of, politeness, while the conceptualization of both phenomena reveals the respondents' preoccupation with societal issues concerning social norms and rights and the ensuing notion of appropriateness in context. Another interesting finding that emerged from this study is that for the majority of our informants, impoliteness is expressed verbally, whereas the reverse is true of politeness, which is primarily seen in terms of non-verbal action. Finally, rather expectedly, our informants view their society as becoming less polite than it used to be and attribute this change primarily to the fast and hectic pace of life.

The aim of this paper is to conduct a contextually and culturally sensitive investigation of how impoliteness works in Peninsular Spanish discourse. This is achieved by adopting a genre-approach to im-politeness (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, International Review of Pragmatics 2: 46–94, 2010), which argues that genre notions, as understood by Fairclough, Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research, Routledge, (2003), can anchor top-down (im-politeness2) and bottom-up (impoliteness1) analyses. The genre approach also accommodates institutional, polylogal, mediated forms of interaction, which are rarely accounted for in extant impoliteness models. The context in which use and interpretation of impoliteness is examined is a talk show on Spanish public television, La Noria (Tele Cinco), which is not only very popular with audiences, but also widely known for its adversarial style. For the analysis, a methodologically sophisticated experimental design is implemented. This design integrates (i) a terminological corpus-based analysis; (ii) a multimodal questionnaire (n = 100); and focus groups (n = 2). Results confirm that the seemingly default term descortesía (‘impoliteness’) may not be the most appropriate to refer to the phenomena under scrutiny. The multimodal questionnaire and the discourse analysis of the focus groups' interaction reveal highly variable and far from homogenous assessments of particular panelists' behaviors. Results further reveal that ideology and emotions play an important role in assessments of im-politeness, as does the co-constructed identity of participants. In contrast, intention appears not to be invoked as the basis of those assessments.