Impoliteness in parliamentary discourse: a cognitive-pragmatic and sociocultural approach

Abstract

This article focuses on the use of impoliteness strategies in the discourse of American, Bulgarian, Polish, and Ukrainian parliaments. Our research of impolite rhetoric, also known as unparliamentary language, is located on the intersection of cognitive pragmatics, cultural linguistics, and discourse analysis. We use an integrative framework, in which the pragmatics of impoliteness is underpinned by the cognitive model of the concept of impoliteness. We offer a description of impoliteness strategies in parliamentary discourse, single out the leading strategy of devaluation of the opponent, and define the stereotypical for each parliament verbal means of the strategy of devaluation and its tactics: criticism and belittlement of one’s merits and importance. Their verbal markers are lexicalized and syntactic units bearing the meaning of negative characterization, disrespect, mockery, sarcasm. We hypothesize that the variation of impoliteness strategies is different parliamentary discourses corresponds to linguistic, pragmatic, and sociocultural dissimilarities, and provide support for this through an empirical study. Linguistically, discursive means of devaluation in the American, Bulgarian, Polish, and Ukrainian parliaments are context free and context dependent, and their ratio varies. In all these parliamentary discourses, the lexicalized markers of impoliteness come from common mental source domains: negative evaluation, legal offence, democracy, deception, hostilities, their variation is due to corresponding construals of the world. Culturally, we claim that the form and content of impoliteness strategies is indirectly connected with a low-context culture in the USA as opposed to a high-context type of Slavic cultures. In the former, devaluation of opponents is mostly reached by lexicalized markers with inherent negative meaning; and in the latter, by syntactic context-dependent means. Pragmatically, the specific properties of impoliteness strategies in the four parliamentary discourses reveal their relation to the dominant politeness principles, which are negatively oriented in modern English and positively in Bulgarian, Polish, and Ukrainian.