Ipra-The Metalanguage of Impoliteness4

8/13/2019 Ipra-The Metalanguage of Impoliteness4

1/17

The Metalanguage ofIMPOLITENESS

Jonathan Culpeper,Lancaster University


2/17

The impetus

All politeness or impoliteness studies need to adopt ametalanguage to describe the phenomena thatconstitute politeness/impoliteness (e.g. am I studyingimpoliteness or rudeness?)Pseudo -scientific classic politeness theories seemremote from or pay little attention to the lay personsusage of politeness terms and what they might mean(e.g. Eelen 2001; Watts 2003).Scholars, of whatever persuasion, have not donemuch (anything?) to investigate the lay personsmetalanguage.


3/17

IMPOLITENESS and its metalanguage

An individuals assessment of behaviour, partly influencedby evaluative beliefs, is represented in mind and can beexpressed in language leading to metapragmaticcomments (e.g. That sounds rude).

What is expressed in IMPOLITENESS metapragmaticcomments:(1) may be expressed for strategic reasons and not actuallyreflect a persons assessment, and(2) may involve words and phrases conventionallyunderstood within a speech community to refer to anassessment of behaviour in context as IMPOLITE. Theseterms and expressions = the metalanguage.


4/17

Labels in the academic community: The(im)politeness literature(used in indexes, figures, titles and sub-titles, and abstracts)

Impolite(ness) (e.g. Leech 1983; Blum-Kulka 1987; Culpeper1996; Kienpointner 1997; Spencer-Oatey 2000; Harris 2001;Eelen 2001; Watts 2003; Mills 2003; Locher 2004; Bousfield andLocher 2007)

Rude(ness) (e.g. Brown and Levinson 1989; Spencer-Oatey2000; Lakoff 1989; Tracy and Tracy 1990; Kasper 1990; Beebe1995; Kienpointner 1997)

Aggravation, aggravated/aggravating language/facework

(e.g. Blum-Kulka 1987, 1990; Lachenicht 1980; Craig et al.1986) (also aggravated impoliteness , Rudanko 2006) Aggressive facework (e.g. Goffman 1967; Watts 2003) Face attack (e.g. Tracy and Tracy 1990) Verbal aggression (e.g. Archer 2007) Verbal abuse ?


5/17

Frequency and distribution of hits forIMPOLITENESS-related expressions in theSocial Sciences Citation Index


6/17

A glance at IMPOLITENESS-relatedprohibitions: Signs and documents


7/17

A glance at IMPOLITENESS-relatedprohibitions: Signs and documents (contd.)

Typically:

Verbal [abuse / bullying / aggression /violence]Threats / threatening behaviour Insults / insulting [words / behaviours]Derogatory remarks


8/17

Corpus explorations: IMPOLITENESS-related metalanguage

Any natural corpus will be skewed. Somesentences wont occur because they are

obvious, others because they are false, stillare those because they are impolite. Thecorpus, if natural, will be so wildly skewedthat the description would be no more than amere list. (Chomsky 1962: 159, a conferencepaper delivered in 1958)

BNC too small?


9/17

Oxford English Corpus

Over one billion words from the period 2000-2006.Divided into 20 major subject areas orsubcorpora .Further info: http://www.askoxford.com/oec


10/17

Oxford English Corpus (contd.)


11/17

OEC frequencies of IMPOLITENESS-related terms


12/17

Distribution of rude and impolite over OECcategories

Year: both terms increasingly frequent 2000 to2005.

Dialect: usage similar in British & AmericanEnglish. ( rude vastly more frequent inCaribbean English)Gender: both more frequent in male texts

Subject domain: similar distribution

(Minimum frequency for a category to berepresented is 25)


13/17

Sketch Engine: Impolite and rude compared

A word sketch is a summary of a wordsgrammatical and collocational behaviour.Considers 27 grammatical relations. Provides one listof collocates for each of the grammatical relations theword participates in.Undertakes statistical comparisons of those lists.

For details, see: Kilgarriff et al. (2004)


14/17

Sketch Engine: Impolite and rude compared (contd.)

Some observations:

Re. words that are used in similar linguistic contexts,contrasting with rude , impolite patterns with complex, high -

style words (e.g. presumptuous, disrespectful, impertinent,inconsiderate ). Also, most impolite items are impoliteness-related, but rude has more that are not, including those relatedto stupidity (e.g. stupid, silly, dumb ).The prototypical linguistic context shared by both impolite and

rude is: [It / that] [would be / seems / is / is considered] [so /very / not] [impolite / rude] to [stare / ask / say]. Impolite has no distinct collocational/colligational contexts. Rude generally differs from impolite in its wider array ofcollocations. It also has positive uses (e.g. rude health, rude

boyz)


15/17

Sketch Engine: Impolite and rude compared (contd.)

Observations on the collocations of rude :

Considerable variation in intensity (from a little rude toinspeakably rude).The most frequent subject it complements is staff (a socialrole), but also items related to children and men.

Actions considered rude include (in order of stat. signif.):interrupting, refusing, pointing, leaving, ignoring, talking,

calling.Rude is applied to behaviours in the context of (in order ofstat. signif.): guests, strangers, customers, friends, women.


16/17

Final thoughts

Compared with rude, impoliteness is so rarely used (and whenit is, it is often in academic writing). An available candidate fora (scientific) theory of impoliteness2?

Impolite is not synonymous with rude but matches a subset ofits meanings. (In usage, somewhat more high -style).

Rude is relatively frequent, and varies considerably in intensity.It also has meanings that lie outside IMPOLITENESS.What about verbal abuse (and, to a lesser extent, verbalaggression )? This is the most frequent expression in the social

sciences and also in public prohibitions, and verbal abuse alsohas some limited ge. Does it lie outside what might bedescribed as impolite or rude, or is it a subset of meaningswithin it?

Closer scrutiny of examples needed.


17/17

Incivility and other forms ofmistreatment (Pearson et al. 2001)

Documents

Ipra-The Metalanguage of Impoliteness4