Volume 4, Issue 2

In this paper I argue for a different standard to assess the quality of communicative conduct in local governance meetings. Rather than seeing public talk occasions as needing politeness or civility, a better norm, I suggest, is “reasonable hostility”. Emotionally marked criticism of the past and future actions of public persons (i. e., reasonable hostility), I show, is necessary for the able functioning of democratic bodies. Following a critique of politeness theories, including a claim for why Goffman's concept of face is more suitable for exploring situated communicative practices, background on U.S. school governance practices and the particular U.S. school board meetings that are the focus of this paper are provided. Then, I illustrate and analyze recurrent, ordinary kinds of face-attack that occurred in the community's public meetings and provide evidence that meeting participants judged the remarks to be face-attacking. In the paper's concluding section, I describe the situation and face-attack features that distinguish reasonable hostility from unreasonable forms.

In New Zealand, as in many other post-colonial societies, biculturalism is a one-way street: Māori New Zealanders are more likely to be bicultural than are Pākehā New Zealanders. Consequently it is Māori norms, including discourse norms, which are more likely to be ignored in most New Zealand workplaces, with the potential for misunderstanding, and even for offence and unintended insult. Our research in Māori and Pākehā workplaces suggests that unintended impoliteness can subtly infiltrate the core activities of workplaces, namely workplace meetings. We illustrate this by examining differences in the ways in which Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders open and close meetings, and the ways in which Māori and Pākehā make critical comments about the behaviour of workplace employees, relating these discourse moves to considerations of politeness and impoliteness. Our data suggests that while Māori meeting openings tend to be direct, explicit, and elaborated, Pākehā meeting openings are brief and minimal. On the other hand, Māori critical comments in the workplace tend to be indirect, implicit and generalized, while at least in some Pākehā workplaces, criticism can be direct, contestive, and confrontational. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the tendencies identified are based on exploratory research, and that further research is needed to confirm or contest our tentative generalizations.

This paper demonstrates how impoliteness is viewed from the perspective of conversation analysis. Offering an alternative to sociolinguistic policies of establishing the linguistic features that characterize impolite speech acts, it explores the ways that members themselves orient to actions in interaction as impolite, i.e., “rude” and/or “insulting”. The analysis draws on data from a range of settings including ordinary conversation, small claims courts, counselling sessions and broadcast talk to examine how, in such interactional environments, insults or episodes of rudeness may be produced, reported and responded to.

After a few introductory remarks on recent impoliteness research, a preliminary definition of impoliteness/rudeness is given. Then the important role emotions play in relation to (im)politeness is briefly sketched, followed by descriptions of some connections between emotional arguments, fallacies and impoliteness. Emotional arguments need not be fallacious nor are they always formulated in impolite ways. However, certain fallacious subtypes of emotional arguments involving appeals to negative emotions tend to be formulated in an impolite way. Such arguments are called “destructive arguments” in this paper. A few case studies of spoken and written passages of argumentative discourse are used to support the hypothesis that certain subtypes of emotional arguments are likely to be destructive. It is also shown, however, that sometimes even fallacious arguments involving positive emotions, such as pity, can be formulated in an impolite way. Finally, it is demonstrated that in certain exceptional cases even rude and fallacious arguments are not (totally) destructive because they ultimately serve some vital interests of the opponent.

The main purpose of swearing is to express emotions, especially anger and frustration. Swear words are well suited to express emotion as their primary meanings are connotative. The emotional impact of swearing depends on one's experience with a culture and its language conventions. A cognitive psychological framework is used to account for swearing in a variety of contexts and provide a link to impoliteness research. In support of this framework, native and non-native English-speaking college students rated the offensiveness and likelihood of hypothetical scenarios involving taboo words. The ratings demonstrated that appropriateness of swearing is highly contextually variable, dependent on speaker-listener relationship, social-physical context, and particular word used. Additionally, offensiveness ratings were shown to depend on gender (for native speakers) and English experience (for non-native speakers). Collectively these data support the idea that it takes time for speakers to learn where, when, and with whom swearing is appropriate.

The present article takes a discursive approach to the topic of impoliteness, in which conceptualizations of impoliteness are construed in the process of real-time interaction. The term “discursive” refers neither to a conversational analytic approach to interaction nor to one which is derived from principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. It rests rather on lay members' ongoing interpretations of what constitutes inappropriate forms of behaviour rather than on a theoretical concept that we choose to label “impoliteness”. The article makes a case for rejecting the term “impoliteness” itself on two grounds: (a) that this term would only make it the mirror opposite of whatever is taken to be “politeness”, and (b) that lay members, if they comment on inappropriate behaviour at all, are more likely to use terms such as rude, offensive, or aggressive than impolite. If we wish to tease out evidence of such imputations in the absence of lexical items indexing behaviour from instantiations of oral interaction, we need to apply the insights of cognitive blending theory and to adapt that theory in such a way that it can account for differential conceptualizations of behaviour as inappropriate or not. In this sense, the article is intended as a contribution towards the wider theory of relational work which has emerged recently from politeness research.