Face and impoliteness at the intersection with emotions: A corpus-based study in Turkish

Abstract

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.