Impoliteness Strategies Research Articles

Impoliteness Strategies and Gender Differences among Disney Modern Protagonists

Disney Animation industry has grown, over the years, as a powerful producer of youth media and generator of visual culture. Its animation films break into the world’s living-room screens and mesmerize young spectators with a fantasy world full of life, magic and colors, where love and happiness are everlasting. The genre of anime, through a series of images, creates a link between the child and characters; a desirable image of self-seeing oneself reflected and experienced by the story characters, mediates how the spectator wants to be seen by others. Hence, these fe/male protagonists cross from being plain characters to become “Role Models” promoting impolite social norms and gender performances through their discursive practices. This research is concerned with the study of how modern fe/male highest grossing Disney characters use language to shape social identities through their impolite discourse and gender behaviors; By drawing on Culpeper’s (2010) ‘Model of Impoliteness Formulae’. The results of the model will be further examined with language and gender theories in order to uncover how both genders (females and males) use impoliteness strategies to re/produce and maintain their power relations. Keywords: Disney, role models, impoliteness, gender, power

Globalization, conflict discourse, and Jewish identity in an Israeli Russian-speaking online community

Using the frameworks of (im)politeness and identity (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou, 2017), this article examines multi-participant polylogal conflict discourse between Jewish ex-Soviet migrants residing in different countries. For Russian-speaking ex-Soviet migrants, Jewish identity is important and at the same time often hotly contested. Migrants use a variety of impoliteness strategies, which are analyzed using Culpeper's 1996 classic impoliteness framework as modified by Dobs and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2013). Specific impoliteness strategies are then related to the migrants' transnational identities.I argue that the choice of linguistic code is crucial for both the construction of conflict and for identity work in a globalized context. Migrants have multiple linguistic choices at their disposal, both hegemonic and global (Modern Standard Russian; Hebrew), and non-hegemonic, specifically the highly localized immigrant vernacular, Israeli Russian. I argue that refraining from sharing this common vernacular constitutes an Ignore, Snub the Other impoliteness strategy where Israel-based forum members disaffiliate from a Moscow-based forum member.

Interactive programmes on private radio stations in Ghana: An avenue for impoliteness

Abstract This study aims at showing the impoliteness strategies employed during some radio interactions. The data used here are mainly recordings of the morning shows of some private radio stations in Ghana. We establish that all the recorded utterances have some features that correspond with at least one of Culpeper’s (1996, 2005) impoliteness strategies, which are bald on record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness, off-record impoliteness and withhold politeness. However, many of the participants prefer the use of the on-record strategies to the off-record strategies of impoliteness. We therefore assert that many participants in interactive radio programmes in Ghana prefer to convey messages to their addressees in a more direct and unrestrained manner, with little or no attention to their (addressees’) face needs. These participants attack the faces of more powerful people not only to demean their social status but also to demand quicker results and gain some psychological relief.

Typology of impoliteness strategies in the discourse of W. Shakespeare

The article identifies impoliteness strategies in the dramatic discourse of W. Shakespeare and provides their typology on cognitive and communicative basis. Parameters of analyzing impoliteness strategies are summarized and the necessity of including the notion of intersubjectivity into the methodological basis of studying impoliteness is justified. According to the parameters of situationality, intentionality, face, communicative norm and emotionality of perlocution main types of impoliteness strategies in Shakespeare’s dramas are determined: strategy of intrusion with tactics of disturbance and intended harm; strategy of imposition with tactics of unreasonable self-confidence, immoderacy and moral exaggeration, disrespectful attitude, shamelessness, selfishness; strategy of unwarranted exclusion of the hearer with tactics of non-acceptance/distancing, avoidance of speech or disability to speak, unfriendliness, hostility, insensitivity, intentional neglect of other people’s feelings; strategy of devaluation of the hearer with tactics of humiliating and criticism; strategy of violation of a norm with tactics of violating aesthetical, ethical and rational norms; strategy of mock impoliteness with tactics of sarcasm, banter and inappropriate playfulness. The article also presents cognitive and pragmatic characteristics of certain types of impoliteness strategies, and specifies linguistic means of their realization in discourse. The most frequent impoliteness strategies in Shakespearean dramas are identified and the possibility of concurrent use of several strategies within one communicative interaction is emphasized.

Impoliteness Strategies in ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’: A Gender-based Study

This study aims at finding out gender differences in impoliteness strategies made by African American characters in the TV series ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ to enact humor. The researchers analyzed 151 impolite utterances from Season 1 from ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’, which consisted of 25 episodes. The findings support previous research that males use impoliteness more than females. It was also found out that male characters utilized impoliteness strategies more than female characters in both evoking impoliteness and responding to face attacks. Regardless of gender, attacking the hearer’s negative face was more preferred by African American characters than attacking the hearer’s positive face. Males and females differed significantly in initiating negative impoliteness and sarcasm or mock impoliteness. However, the differences between the two genders in responding to impoliteness were insignificant..

Performing acts of impoliteness through code-switching to English in colloquial Jordanian Arabic interactions

Abstract This article investigates how English is exploited in naturally occurring interactions in colloquial Jordanian Arabic to perform acts of impoliteness, drawing on impoliteness model by Culpeper (1996), its subsequent modifications in Culpeper et al. (2003) and Culpeper (2005), and its alignment with Spencer-Oatey’s (2002) concept of rapport-management. Attack on face, specifically Quality Face, Social Identity Face, and Association Rights, through code-switching to English were identified in the data. Positive impoliteness and negative impoliteness strategies were employed through using English, sometimes in conjunction with Arabic impoliteness resources. Furthermore, English was used as an indirect impoliteness strategy to do off-record impoliteness to convey impolite beliefs about a third party or a particular state of affairs. These acts of impoliteness were mainly countered defensively by ignoring the attack or offensively through countering the implied face attack with face attack.

(Im)politeness in the discourse on crime: naming of offender

By focusing on the study of naming of an offender in the media in one particular case when father killed his two children in Saviečiai, this paper provides a perspective on the discourse on crime as the discourse governed by the strategies of impoliteness. The face management theory (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and the insight of face attacking acts (Austin 1987) is considered here to be generally useful for the analyses of the discourse on crime which is, as a rule, about negatively evaluated persons and their actions. Having analysed 46 crime reports in the Lithuanian media published in the period of one month on January 2016, 36 different nominal references of the offender have been found. The results reveal that the level of politeness in the discourse on crime can be assessed considering the naming of an offender. In this discourse the naming of the offender is performed mainly as face attacking acts: 1) a naming word has a negative emotional evaluation or is an obvious insult or nickname which might be considered as a dysphemism (vaikžudys, smurtautojas, skriaudikas, žudikas, siaubūnas, antžmogis, monstras, budelis, išgama, degradas, navikas, alkoholikas, girtuoklis, chuliganas); 2) neutral naming words (vyras, tėvas, A. Beras, etc.) are modified by means of extended attributes that indicate the crime and the victims, the location of the crime. In fact, it often expresses a straightforward negative assessment. This type of naming of the offender with an additional indication of the time of the offense, the date of birth of the offender, the age and sex of the victims, is voluminous (up to 25 words) in this discourse. Such a naming becomes like a brief statement or a story in itself. Developing a discourse on this crime, this type of naming is continuously employed as if there were fears that readers won’t identify the offender. Such a naming or even a nickname substitutes the proper name of the offender in the titles of the articles. The term suspect, which might soften the assertiveness of a statement, is rarely used. The results disclose that to speak negatively in the media articles about crime (to use nicknames, insults, to emphasize the negativity and criticism, to lie in order to make an impression of the negativity) is the norm, so the discourse on crime can be seen as a discourse, allowing the strategies of impoliteness.

Negotiation and Impoliteness Strategies in Saudi and Australian Postgraduate Students’ Emails

Although negotiation via email takes place every day between students and their supervisors/lecturers, the processes underlying these negotiations have been largely neglected in research to date. Further, there is a need to investigate the linguistic email communication problems that Saudis encounter when they study abroad. This study aims to identify the dominant features of email communication of twenty Saudi and Australian post-graduate students with their lecturers. The research sought to understand the following: to what extent negotiation moves differ from one group to another; if there is a significant difference between the two raters when rating native speakers (NS) versus non-native speakers (NNS); whether there is a significant relationship between students scores and total number of words used in negotiation moves; the most important moves that might have affected the raters decisions when giving the highest scores versus the lowest scores; and whether there is difference between total scores of NS and NNS. Whereas the qualitative analysis employed (im)politeness as the theoretical framework, the quantitative analysis focused on the moves used by students in terms of context, proposal, justification, options, and requests. It was found that NS and NNS had similar likelihoods of gaining higher grades when using more details. When both NS and NNS failed to employ a focus-on-context move, they were likely to fail in their negotiations. International students need to be encouraged to give more detailed explanations to improve their negotiation techniques. Pedagogical implications include greater insights into the appropriate use of email negotiation strategies between students and their lecturers.

Impoliteness Strategies in English and Arabic Facebook Comments

The study investigates Culpeper's (1996) impoliteness strategies in English and Arabic Facebook comments. The study aims at describing the types of impoliteness strategies used by facebookers in online contexts, and what factors may affect this use. As such, six pages are selected and there are four strategies found in Facebook contexts: bald on record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, sarcasm/mock impoliteness. Positive and negative impoliteness are the most frequent types, whereas, withdraw politeness does not exist in online contexts. The findings show a great similarity between English and Arabic data in the most used strategies, but the topics that cause the use of impoliteness were different.

Impoliteness in EFL: Foreign Language Learners’ Complaining Behaviors Across Social Distance and Status Levels

A growing body of literature has investigated impoliteness in many domains. Nevertheless, little research has examined impoliteness done by foreign language learners. Impoliteness used in interlanguage complaints by English as a foreign language learners was observed. The effects of interlocutors’ different status levels and social distance on the use of impoliteness were analyzed. Empirical data were elicited by means of oral discourse completion tasks from 50 Indonesian English as a foreign language learners in Central Java, Indonesia. The overall direction of the findings showed trends that status levels and social distance between interlocutors prompted different frequencies and strategies of impoliteness. The frequent use of impolite complaints was instigated by a number of factors such as the learners’ understanding about the speech act in question, their perceptions on the social distance and status levels of interlocutors, and the nature of the research instrument.

Impoliteness and Thematic Variation in Spanish Television Interviews

This paper analyses Spanish television interviews and presents a contrast between the impolite argumentative strategies employed by the interviewer to attack the image of the interviewee in interviews with politicians and celebrities. It aims to demonstrate how the topic addressed and the subtype of interview influence the strategies employed and degree of impoliteness shown by the interviewer. The analysis of our corpus has shown that the current television interview differs from the traditional format of this genre in a number of respects. Impoliteness is used in Spanish interviews in order to attract the audience and to build the journalist’s face in political interviews as participants in ideological confrontation. Nevertheless, the detailed study of the impoliteness strategies employed by the interviewer has shown that the modification of features largely depends on the subtype examined. We observed in television celebrity interviews a wider range of strategies of verbal impoliteness, which are absent from political interviews. This explains why a variationist perspective has been adopted in the analysis of verbal impoliteness.

Performing acts of impoliteness through code-switching to English in colloquial Jordanian Arabic interactions

This article investigates how English is exploited in naturally occurring interactions in colloquial Jordanian Arabic to perform acts of impoliteness, drawing on impoliteness model by Culpeper (1996), its subsequent modifications in Culpeper et al. (2003) and Culpeper (2005), and its alignment with Spencer-Oatey’s (2002) concept of rapport-management. Attack on face, specifically Quality Face, Social Identity Face, and Association Rights, through code-switching to English were identified in the data. Positive impoliteness and negative impoliteness strategies were employed through using English, sometimes in conjunction with Arabic impoliteness resources. Furthermore, English was used as an indirect impoliteness strategy to do off-record impoliteness to convey impolite beliefs about a third party or a particular state of affairs. These acts of impoliteness were mainly countered defensively by ignoring the attack or offensively through countering the implied face attack with face attack.

FACE-THREATENING ACTS AND IMPOLITENESS IN COMMENTS IN PENINSULAR SPANISH BLOGS

The unique characteristics of online communication have benefited the increase in the use of impoliteness strategies. Blog, as relevant social media in today’s society, have become an excellent setting for the use of these impoliteness strategies. In addition, continuous face-threatening acts are found in the interactions in this type of media. However, little consideration has been given to this fact from the point of view of studies about (im)politeness. The relevance of the present paper is, therefore, the pursuit of the characterization of impoliteness and the face-threatening acts in blogs’ commentaries based on 90 samples taken from peninsular Spanish blogs about different topics. Great attention will be paid to: (1) the mechanisms employed in this type of impolite interactions; (2) the established distinctions in regards to the target of the impolite strategy; (3) the speaker’s intention; and (4) the effects on the recipient.

Cultural Values and Impolite Behaviour. The Case of Spaniards and North-Americans

This paper explores the influence of the individualism index (Hofstede 1991) of Spaniards and North-Americans on verbal impoliteness behaviour following Kaul de Marlangeon’s (2008) taxonomy of impolite acts. The level of social distance and affect between the interlocutors are considered as potential factors impacting on the use of impoliteness types and strategies. The corpus consists of scripts from a small sample of six movies (three from Spain and three from the US) and we follow an observational and a quantitative analysis. The findings reveal remarkable statistical differences as a result of the impact of cultural values on the verbal impoliteness behaviour of speakers from each country.

Being impolite while pretending to be polite. The rupture of politeness conventions in electoral debates

This paper is a part of a larger research that pursues a global understanding of impoliteness in face-to-face electoral debates. That research distinguishes three essential axes, three complementary analytical perspectives: functional strategies of impoliteness, linguistic-discursive mechanisms to implement them and social impacts of impolite acts. In this frame, the present work develops an in-depth analysis of a special category of mechanisms, namely the rupture of politeness conventions, a subgroup within postliteral implicit mechanisms. This subgroup acquires its identity by the fact of carrying out a linguistic action that is conventionally associated with a polite attitude, but doing it in a rhetorically insincere way: the consequence is that apparent politeness becomes impoliteness. Relevant aspects in the characterization of ruptures are isolated and, on this basis, it is developed a detailed analysis of three specific kinds of mechanisms in which ruptures take shape: using ironic statements, developing different forms of overpoliteness and adopting a falsely collaborative attitude toward the interlocutor. The analysis of that group of mechanisms takes into account, simultaneously, the other two axes of the main research, strategies and social impacts.

La figura de la mujer: la (des)cortesía y la construcción de la imagen de la mujer en el blog Testosterona

Traditional constructions of gender eventually generate in many cases, a system of stereotyped behaviors. This work aims to investigate how the blog post “What women need to know about relationships” uses (im) politeness strategies to build the image of women. This research was conducted in two stages: a) In the first phase, we considered the correlating modes of manifestation of power proposed by Thompson (2000), politeness strategies postulated by Brown and Levinson (1987) and the studies of (im)politeness of Bousfield (2008); b) after that, we identified the (im)politeness strategies in the comments to the post, which were analyzed according to the contextual and ideological elements suggested by Thompson, 2000. The results have shown that the author of those publications and the audience use off-record politeness strategies and positive/ negative impoliteness strategies to express different forms of power, these include dissimulation, fragmentation and unification. Based on this model, we conclude that the image of women is trivialized by a sexist discourse, which infiltrate politeness strategies.

Identidad, imagen y (des)cortesía en Cartagena de Indias (siglo XVII). Diálogos surgidos desde el enfrentamiento étnico

This article forms part of the historical interpersonal pragmatics. The data belong to the rites of interaction, both in reported speech and dialogue inserted in the proceedings of a trial held in the city of Cartagena de Indias, in the late seventeenth century, and connected with the rebellion of the runaway slaves. The main objective of this paper is to show how the activity of the image is a key element for the study of interaction in a context of social and ethnic conflict. This paper chooses the sociological perspective of balance between self and society. Individuals are integrated into social figurations, with race as a factor shaping these groups and determining the identity of “blacks” as outsiders and stigmatized. Social disorder causes the anomie of participants and personal disorganization and disruption of the integration of the actions of participants (Goffman, 1961, cited by Smith 2006, pp. 33-54). Two aspects highlight in the analysis of interpersonal relation through ‘dialogues’ within this particular historical and social context. The first aspect is the dynamic nature of the conceptualization of image and image activity, since the process of communication is “co-constituting” on face-to-face interaction based on the influence exerted by precedent and consequent exchanges between the interactors (Arundale, 1999, pp. 119-153). The second aspect shows how through the analysis of the dialogic tensions the strategies of (im)politeness are connected with the social image and this is linked, in turn, with the social identity.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Impolite Interruptions of Selected Debates in the Opposite Direction of Al-Jazeera Channel

The present paper draws a conversational sketch of impoliteness strategies as employed by interlocutors in the Opposite Direction presented by Al-Jazeera satellite channel. In the heat of discussion, interlocutors resort to certain aggressive strategies to attack each other's face in an attempt to get the floor and instigate the other interviewee to react in a more offensive manner. This situation is usually triggered and intensified by the interviewer who is supposed to be neutral and works into managing the interview. The more offensive the debate is, the more interested the viewers will be. The study collates a corpus consisting of one translated episode into English [25] of the ‘Opposite Direction’ covering the topic of ‘The Clash of Civilization and the Class of Religions’ in which the interviewer Faisal Qasim (FQ), a famous journalist on Al-Jazeera Channel invites Wafa Sultan (WS), a writer and a researcher in Los Angles and Ibrahim Al-Khouli (IK), a lecturer at Al-Azher University. The paper adopts Culpeper's Model of impoliteness (1996) in the analysis of impoliteness instances in the selected corpus. Results show that the most common strategies of impoliteness interruptions employed by interlocutors include bold on record impoliteness, mock impoliteness, negative impoliteness, ignorance, showing disinterest and unconcern, using imperatives and direct sarcastic questions that do not seek answers, accusations and ridiculing and using profane language. They also show that the interviewer (FQ) has played a role in instigating the interviewees to resort to impolite interruptions.

Utterance-final -ketun in spoken Korean: A particle for managing information structure in discourse

This paper explores the functions of the utterance-final particle -ketun in Modern Spoken Korean. In it, I analyze naturally occurring spontaneous conversational data to provide a unified account of utterance-final -ketun's several apparently disparate functions, arguing that its basic function is to manage the flow of information in discourse. Specifically, I claim that -ketun presents a pragmatic assertion that, in the speaker's view, should be or should have been a pragmatic presupposition, as if it were a pragmatic presupposition. The data analyzed in this study suggest that -ketun is a useful device by which speakers can ease the disorderly flow of information in spontaneous conversations, in particular to repair or avoid potential hitches in the order of presentation. This basic information-management function can be extended to highlight or manage mismatches between the speaker's and the hearer's states of knowledge, as part of either politeness strategies or impoliteness strategies. Collectively, the usages of -ketun discussed in this paper suggest that it is a highly intersubjective marker, in that it reflects the speaker's attention to the hearer's state of knowledge and changes in that state of knowledge.

Impoliteness in Literary Discourse: A Pragmatic Study

Brown and Levinson's model of politeness (1987) paved the way for linguists to explore the phenomenon of impoliteness. Meanwhile, Brown and Levinson dealt with politeness as a knotty framework applied to soften face threatening acts, other linguists including, Culpeper, Bousfield and Eelen, headed for the opposite direction of politeness. In other words, they studied the communicative situations where the speaker's purpose is to damage a hearer's face rather than softening face threatening acts. This research paper is intended to examine the opposite direction of politeness ‘impoliteness phenomenon’ in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913). Furthermore, it highlights the variation of impoliteness strategies used by characters. It is worth mentioning that the present paper is qualitative as it is dedicated to describe a certain pragmatic phenomenon, i.e., impoliteness, depending on Culpeper’s (2005) model of impoliteness, as a theoretical framework, to identify impoliteness in an advisedly chosen literary text. Consequently it is hoped to provide a deeper understanding of the fictional characters by applying a pragmatic analysis through which the characters' conversation will be examined thoroughly.