Volume 21, Issue 2

In their endeavor to theorize impoliteness from a Levinasian perspective, Xie and Fan (2024. Theorizing impoliteness: A Levinasian perspective. Journal of Politeness Research 20(1). 157–181) have recently proposed the concept of the ethics of impoliteness. In this paper, I seek to conceptualize these ethics in terms of power in a broader sense. I argue that (1) impoliteness, as the exercise of power, is ethical when it is employed not to ridicule, insult, threaten or dominate the other, or control the other’s action, but to defend one’s individuality, call for respect and understanding, and ultimately to ensure dialogue on equal terms, (2) as mundane communicative practice, it is arguably more substantial and instrumental than politeness in negotiating individual difference, reshaping human character and transforming social relationships, and (3) when it is employed to challenge, interrupt, or transcend an existing power relation, the efforts of both members of an interactive dyad are required if equality in communication is to be achieved. I then apply this perspective to excerpts from a literary classic, namely, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , in order to explore in what sense impoliteness is ethical and in what sense it is not.

In state dinner speeches, US-American presidents address international partners with the communicative goal of consolidating and improving bilateral political relations. The present paper aims to investigate the ways in which positive politeness strategies are employed in this epideictic genre to establish a good rapport with other heads of state. The study is based on a dataset of 32 dinner speeches covering a period of 32 years from George H. W. Bush to Joseph R. Biden. It adopts a qualitative approach that combines politeness theory with move structure analysis, identifying characteristic rhetorical moves that create familiarity by referring to common past events, shared values, and joint activities. As is shown, politeness in dinner speeches relies on recurring discursive techniques such as displaying strong interest in the international partner, seeking agreement regarding political agendas, paying compliments, and conveying optimism about the bilateral alliance. These politeness strategies are realized by a variety of linguistic devices such as inclusive first-person pronouns, illustrative metaphors, positively connoted stance markers, superlatives, adverbial amplifiers, and quotations from eminent writers of the partner country. Such genre-dependent positive politeness dominantly fulfils a face-enhancing function and helps the orators to construct engaging identities of the interactants.

Academic interest in impoliteness within political interactions has grown, but there remains a significant gap in the exploration of Chinese political discourse, let alone understanding how and why multiple participants perceive and respond to this phenomenon. Moreover, metaphor, as a crucial off-record strategy in impoliteness research, has not been given in-depth scrutiny by pragmaticists. To address the gaps, we collected 228 Chinese diplomatic press conference texts, and interviewed 27 Chinese citizens to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze external journalists’ face-threatening impoliteness and public understandings and retorts, in comparison with Chinese spokespersons’ measures of counter-impoliteness. It is found that first, the journalists’ impoliteness primarily consists of explicit negative association, seeking disagreement, and threatening/frightening. Second, the interviewees’ evaluation of impoliteness is influenced by their background knowledge, collective identity, political stances, and attention to the journalists’ querying manners. Third, the spokespersons use 11 types of deliberate metaphors along with other negative evaluations such as denials and rhetorical questions. Apart from these devices, the interviewees’ responses abound with distinct outpourings of other-condemning sentiment. The multiple recipients’ judgments and rebuttals may interrelate with their discoursal and social roles, which are arguably affected by China’s contemporary diplomacy and nationals’ mentalities.

The aim of this research was to identify whether the ritual frame indicating expression (RFIE) please was used by Thai intermediate-level learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in requests in intercultural communication, as well as to determine whether the Thai intermediate-level EFL learners used any RFIEs in requests in intercultural communication. Dyadic and multiparty academic discussions between Thai university students and American university lecturers were collected, as well as those between university students who spoke English as their first language (L1) and the American university lecturers to enable a comparison. The results revealed that the RFIE please was used at a low frequency by a limited number of Thai university students, indicating that the requestive please cannot be considered an RFIE that the Thai student participants used in requests in intercultural communication. Moreover, the Thai university students used three RFIEs, namely “teacher”, “ajarn”, and the modal verb “can”. The Thai university students mainly used these three RFIEs due to politeness norms in Thai culture, which led to these three RFIEs being used extensively with speech-act heaviness. Accordingly, over-politeness was identified in the use of these three RFIEs in intercultural communication.

According to the literature on impoliteness and political incivility, the evaluation of a transgressive communicative act depends on the context of the speech, the characteristics of the speaker and the audience, and many other factors. This paper examines how the socio-demographic background of a high school girl – who gave a profanity-laden public speech aimed at the political leaders of the country – can influence the evaluation as well as the discursive sanctions. Discursive sanctioning is conceptualized as the verbal proposal of retribution, describing the negative consequences the transgressor should endure. This research employs the methodology of frame analysis to investigate comments written by citizens in response to news media articles shared on Facebook, then creates a typology of discursive sanctions ranging from benign and constructive to harsh and destructive. Results show that age is a more prominent factor influencing the evaluation than gender, even though swearing is usually associated with young people. Results also show the overwhelming support of commenters; however, discursive sanctions include severe age- and gender-specific punishments.

This paper investigates the occurrence and structures of mitigation of directives issued during the early minutes of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest resuscitation attempts, drawing on a dialogue analysis approach based on Searle’s Speech Act Theory. We transcribed the first 5 min of 40 pre-recorded, real-life resuscitation attempts. Line-by-line dialogue annotations, based on a bespoke dialogue annotation scheme, were applied to the dialogue transcripts to extract verbal orders or directives. Results revealed that directives made up about 25 % of the dialogue in these early minutes of real-life cardiac arrest resuscitation attempts. Three quarters of all directives were mitigated to an extent, forming a continuum of mitigated strategies. Some structures of mitigation carried ambiguous meanings and were found to delay target actions. The use of mitigation strategies also added length to directives, thus consuming extra time during the resuscitation attempts. Using softeners and affective terms appeared to be the best way to counterbalance the social imperative of politeness, with the communicative pressure of optimal efficiency.

Utilizing the Labovian-style fieldwork methodology in the form of request for directions, this research delved into the nuances of thanking responses from 16 groups of 960 Chinese respondents, by meticulously controlling four distinct variables: education level (high and low), age (aged and young), complexity of thanking expressions (complex and simple), and indebtedness (knowing and telling the direction, not knowing and failing to tell the direction). The findings reveal that: firstly, the participants’ thanking responses operate within a self-contained framework, characterized by a range of pragmalinguistic forms with varying degrees of politeness and few westernized examples (returning thanks). Among them, verbally minimizing the favor constitutes approximately one fourth of the dataset, followed by verbally acknowledging the thanks and compound strategies. The non-verbal means encompass non-verbal minimizing of the favor and non-verbal acknowledgment of the thanks. Knowing/not-knowing situation-specific strategies include reinforcing the favor, returning thanks, compensating for the unmet favor, and apologizing. Secondly, the participants’ education level and age are found to have a more significant impact on the participants’ awareness of politeness in the thanking response realizations, whereas the regulating effects of the complexity of thanking expressions and their sense of the investigator’s indebtedness to them are relatively minor. The current research further illuminates the intricate connection between politeness and speech acts, especially Chinese politeness in relation to thanking responses.

Address forms have been investigated in various social contexts in association with solidarity and power (Brown, Roger & Albert Gilman. 1960. The pronouns of power and solidarity. In Thomas Albert Sebeok (ed.), Style in language , 252–281. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). In Indo-European languages, solidarity is often linked with singular pronouns, while power is associated with plural pronouns. Anchimbe and Janney (2017. Postcolonial pragmatics. In Anne Baron, Yueguo Gu & Gerard Steen (eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics , 1st edn., 105–120. London: Routledge, Yusra et al. (2023. Borrowing of address forms for dimensions of social relation in a contact-induced multilingual community. Journal of Politeness Research 19(1). 217–248) and other studies have extended this concept to non-European communities with multi-complex social structures and relations. They found that, beyond the solidarity and power continuum, other forms of relations exist, each represented by particular address forms. This study aims to refine these concepts by observing address forms in the Sasak communities. Through ethnographic observation of communication in key community centers, the study investigates the linkage between address forms, social structures, and social relations. By interviewing key informants and recording naturally occurring conversations, the study identifies patterned links between the forms and the conditions governing them. The study provides evidence that precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Sasak societies have undergone significant changes, leading to increasingly complex social structures and relations. This complexity suggests that the binary solidarity-power concept should be revised and extended. Furthermore, the study displays the social dynamics that address forms can play within the postcolonial Sasak communities, highlighting the need for culture-specific refinement of the association between address forms and the nuanced dimensions of social relations.