The Metalanguage of IMPOLITENESS

Jonathan Culpeper, Lancaster University

The impetus
All politeness or impoliteness studies need to adopt a

metalanguage to describe the phenomena that constitute politeness/impoliteness (e.g. am I studying impoliteness or rudeness?) Pseudo-scientific classic politeness theories seem remote from or pay little attention to the lay persons usage of politeness terms and what they might mean (e.g. Eelen 2001; Watts 2003). Scholars, of whatever persuasion, have not done much (anything?) to investigate the lay persons metalanguage.

IMPOLITENESS and its metalanguage

An individuals assessment of behaviour, partly influenced

by evaluative beliefs, is represented in mind and can be expressed in language leading to metapragmatic comments (e.g. That sounds rude). What is expressed in IMPOLITENESS metapragmatic comments: (1) may be expressed for strategic reasons and not actually reflect a persons assessment, and (2) may involve words and phrases conventionally understood within a speech community to refer to an assessment of behaviour in context as IMPOLITE. These terms and expressions = the metalanguage.

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; Culpeper

1996; Kienpointner 1997; Spencer-Oatey 2000; Harris 2001; Eelen 2001; Watts 2003; Mills 2003; Locher 2004; Bousfield and Locher 2007) Rude(ness) (e.g. Brown and Levinson 1989; Spencer-Oatey 2000; Lakoff 1989; Tracy and Tracy 1990; Kasper 1990; Beebe 1995; 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?

Frequency and distribution of hits for IMPOLITENESS-related expressions in the Social Sciences Citation Index

A glance at IMPOLITENESS-related prohibitions: Signs and documents

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

Typically:
Verbal [abuse / bullying / aggression /violence] Threats / threatening behaviour Insults / insulting [words / behaviours]

Derogatory remarks

Corpus explorations: IMPOLITENESSrelated metalanguage

Any natural corpus will be skewed. Some sentences wont occur because they are obvious, others because they are false, still are those because they are impolite. The corpus, if natural, will be so wildly skewed that the description would be no more than a mere list. (Chomsky 1962: 159, a conference paper delivered in 1958) BNC too small?

Oxford English Corpus

Over one billion words from the period 2000-2006. Divided into 20 major subject areas or

subcorpora. Further info: http://www.askoxford.com/oec

Oxford English Corpus (contd.)

OEC frequencies of IMPOLITENESSrelated terms

Distribution of rude and impolite over OEC categories

Year: both terms increasingly frequent 2000 to

2005. Dialect: usage similar in British & American English. (rude vastly more frequent in Caribbean English) Gender: both more frequent in male texts Subject domain: similar distribution

(Minimum frequency for a category to be represented is 25)

Sketch Engine: Impolite and rude compared

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

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

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, highstyle words (e.g. presumptuous, disrespectful, impertinent, inconsiderate). Also, most impolite items are impolitenessrelated, but rude has more that are not, including those related to 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 of collocations. It also has positive uses (e.g. rude health, rude boyz)

Sketch Engine: Impolite and rude compared (contd.)

Observations on the collocations of rude:
Considerable variation in intensity (from a little rude to

inspeakably rude). The most frequent subject it complements is staff (a social role), 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 of stat. signif.): guests, strangers, customers, friends, women.

Final thoughts
Compared with rude, impoliteness is so rarely used (and when

it is, it is often in academic writing). An available candidate for a (scientific) theory of impoliteness2? Impolite is not synonymous with rude but matches a subset of its 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, verbal aggression)? This is the most frequent expression in the social sciences and also in public prohibitions, and verbal abuse also has some limited ge. Does it lie outside what might be described as impolite or rude, or is it a subset of meanings within it? Closer scrutiny of examples needed.

Incivility and other forms of mistreatment (Pearson et al. 2001)