Conventionalised impoliteness formulae

Jonathan Culpeper *
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK
1. Introduction
Goffman (1967:89) discusses ritual affronts or profanations performed by patients in psychiatric wards, varying from
hurling abuse to hurling faeces, and notes that these acts are, from the point of view of society at large and its ceremonial
idiom, calculated to convey complete disrespect and contempt through symbolic means. This paper focusses on the
symbolic linguistic means for conveying impoliteness. Despite some early brief attempts, notably Lachenicht (1980), it is
only in recent years that there has been a concerted effort to explore the language of social interactions which might be
labelled impolite or rude (e.g. Mills, 2005; Culpeper et al., 2003; Culpeper, 2005; Bouseld, 2008; Bouseld and Locher,
2008). Some studies (e.g. Lachenicht, 1980; Culpeper, 1996) are closely modelled on the classic, and most cited, work on
politeness, namely, Brown and Levinson (1987). Instead of containing a description of pragmatic strategies and linguistic
output strategies for achieving politeness, they contain a description of pragmatic strategies and linguistic output
strategies for achieving impoliteness. Such approaches have been much criticised by later politeness studies, notably Eelen
(2001) and Watts (2003), for being too deterministic. It is not the case that any particular linguistic form guarantees an
evaluation that it is impolite in all contexts; moreover, people may disagree about how impolite a linguistic form is.
However, the current tendency to emphasize the context rather than linguistic form risks throwing the baby out with the
bath-water. In fact, virtually no study has attempted to understand the nature of the relationship between linguistic forms
Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245
A R T I C L E I N F O
Article history:
Received 18 February 2009
Received in revised form 13 May 2010
Accepted 18 May 2010
Keywords:
Conventionalisation
Contextualization cues
Formulae
Impoliteness
Metadiscourse
Politeness
Social norms
A B S T R A C T
This paper makes a contribution to the study of impoliteness. More particularly, it explores
conventionalised impoliteness formulae and their basis. It taps into debates about
whether impoliteness (or politeness, for that matter) can be inherent in expressions, and
argues that there is a sense in which it can. An important foundation for this paper is
Terkouras (e.g. 2001, 2002) work on formulaic politeness expressions. However, it
argues that Terkouras strong focus on the frequency of peoples direct experience of
linguistic expressions in specic contexts, whilst appropriate for politeness, does not
entirely suit an account of conventionalised impoliteness formulae. Indirect experience of
impoliteness, especially via metadiscourse, does much to shape what counts as impolite
and thus what may be conventionalised as impolite. Such impoliteness metadiscourse is
driven not only by the salience of impoliteness, but by the social dynamics of impoliteness
itself. Finally, this paper proposes two methods for identifying conventionalised
impoliteness formulae (one being akin to Terkouras method), and offers a preliminary
list of such formulae in English.
2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper was submitted and reviewed before I was invited to apply for the post of co-editor of this journal. All stages of the editorial process were
undertaken by Jacob Mey. The contents of this paper will be expanded and further contextualised in Culpeper (forthcoming).
* Tel.: +44 01524 592443; fax: +44 01524 843085.
E-mail address: j.culpeper@lancaster.ac.uk.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Pragmatics
j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er . com/ l ocat e/ pr agma
0378-2166/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.05.007
and politeness or impoliteness. The exception here is Terkouras (e.g. 2001, 2002, 2005a,b) work on a frame-based approach
to politeness, and this will provide the foundation for much of my own discussion of impoliteness.
Section 2 will briey outline what impoliteness might be. Section 3 discusses differing views on the proposition that
impoliteness is inherent inlinguistic expressions. Section4 briey examines the basis of conventionalised politeness formulae,
whilst section5elaborates onthe basis of conventionalised impoliteness formulae. Finally, section6 proposes twomethods for
retrieving impoliteness formulae, and includes a list of English conventionalised impoliteness formulae arising frommy data.
2. Impoliteness: what is it?
Surveying a recent volume of papers onimpoliteness, the editors conclude there is no solidagreement inthe chapters as to
what impoliteness actually is (Locher and Bouseld, 2008:3). In fact, even the label itself is open to dispute, partly because
there are many labels that relate to the notion of impoliteness, as this short list of English synonyms of the term impoliteness
illustrates:
bad manners, boldness, boorishness, brusqueness, coarseness, contempt, contumely, discourtesy, discourteousness,
dishonor, disrespect, ippancy, hardihood, impertinence, impiety, impudence, incivility, inurbanity, inconsideration,
insolence, insolency, insolentness, irreverence, lack of respect, profanation, rudeness, sacrilege, unmannerliness (http://
thesaurus.reference.com/)
As Locher and Watts (2008:29) note, each of such terms evokes a particular kind of negative evaluation of behaviour. For
example, rude may seembroad, but Culpeper (2009), examining its patterns of usage in the two-billion word Oxford English
Corpus (henceforth, OEC), shows how it is characteristically used of behaviours which occur in public contexts, particularly
public service contexts such as restaurants. Letting the actual meaning of any single label determine the underlying notion of
impoliteness would lead to an exceedingly narrow focus of study. The reasons why I choose the term impoliteness to denote
the underlying notion are: (a) that it provides an obvious counterpoint to the eld of politeness studies, and (b) its extremely
infrequent usage (a mere 30 instances of the noun appear in the OEC) makes it a good candidate for appropriation. I dene
the notion of impoliteness as follows:
Impoliteness is a negative attitude towards specic behaviours occurring in specic contexts. It is sustained by
expectations, desires and/or beliefs about social organisation, including, in particular, how one persons or groups
identities are mediated by others in interaction. Situated behaviours are viewed negatively when they conict with how
one expects themto be, howone wants themto be and/or howone thinks they ought to be. Such behaviours always have
or are presumed to have emotional consequences for at least one participant, that is, they cause or are presumed to cause
offence. Various factors can exacerbate howoffensive an impolite behaviour is taken to be, including for example whether
one understands a behaviour to be strongly intentional or not.
1
3. Is (im)politeness inherent in linguistic expressions?
Although I am particularly interested in impoliteness, the arguments in this section apply equally to politeness. Papers
which state a position on whether (im)politeness is inherent do not actually dene what inherent meaning is. Moreover, the
literature vacillates between talking about meanings inherent in speech acts and meanings inherent in forms, or, in
Austinian (1962) terms, in illocutions and in locutions.
2
As a preliminary in this section, I consider and reject the idea that
(im)politeness is inherent in speech acts. Then, turning to the question posed in the title of this section, I rst consider two
opposed mono views, one arguing for a positive answer, the other a negative answer. Then I consider two variants of a dual
view, arguing for both a positive and a negative answer.
Brown and Levinson (1987:6568) discuss intrinsic FTAs. By face threatening acts, Brown and Levinson (1987:65) mean
what is intended to be done by a verbal or non-verbal communication, just as one or more speech acts can be assigned to an
utterance. What critiques of Brown and Levinsons position neglect is that they talk about acts that primarily (1987:65,
67) or mainly (1987:68) perform face threat. In other words, the notion of inherent or, to use their term, intrinsic face
threatening acts is fuzzy, not absolute. Thus, counter-examples such as orders which are benecial to the hearer (e.g. Tuck
in!, said to encourage the guest to begin a delightful feast) are not a problem. Similarly, cases of banter do not challenge the
basic claim; in fact, they can be taken as exceptions that prove the rule. However, there are still two problems. Firstly, what
1
Readers may note that this denition represents a departure frommy earlier work (e.g. Culpeper, 1996, 2005; Culpeper et al., 2003). I made a decision in
2006 at the beginning of my ERSC-funded Fellowship on impoliteness to start afresh, viewing everything with a critical eye, including my own work. I do not
completely reject my earlier denitions, but I do think they are excessively narrow, capturing just some aspects of prototypical impoliteness. For example,
the idea that impoliteness has to be perceived as intentional (as opposed to accidental) for it to count as impoliteness was central to my previous denitions.
Whilst prototypical impoliteness does involve the perception of behaviour designed to cause offence, my data showed that, on occasion, people took offence
and described the behaviour as impolite or rude despite knowing that the producer had not acted intentionally. Hence, in the denition given in this paper
impoliteness does not have intentionality as a necessary condition.
2
Some researchers refer to linguistic behaviour or forms of behaviour rather than linguistic forms. The term behaviour is better able to
accommodate non-verbal forms and non-contrastive aspects of language, and it has a closer relation with social action (see, for example, Verschureren,
1999:67). Nevertheless, in the publications cited in this paper, it still refers to a forma relatively discrete oral or visual physical phenomenon which,
together with other forms, encodes an aspect of meaning and constitutes a participants communicative repertoire.
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3233
happens if there are so many exceptions that the exceptions become primary? Pertinent examples are provided in work on a
variety of cultures. Take, for example, Nwoyes (1992) exploration of the egalitarian Igbo society of Nigeria. He concludes that:
very few actions are regarded as impositions. Requests, criticisms, thanks, and offers have been examined and have been
found not to be generally considered as imposing. Rather, they are seen as a type of social insurance fromwhich members
of the group draw benets by virtue of a reciprocal social contract according to which, for example, they can ask for (and
get) a small quantity of salt when/if they run out of salt because they expect others to ask for (and obtain) it if they are in
need. As speech acts, such requests are not in themselves inherently polite or impolite; rather, they are appropriate
performances and attributes of good behavior inherent in good upbringing. (1992:327)
Clearly, then, Brown and Levinsons generalisation should have been made culture-specic (it would hold for stereotypical
Britishculture, for instance). Secondly, meanings could only be inherent in speech acts if speech acts themselves had a degree
of determinacy and stability. Unlike the formof an utterance, a speech act depends on a considerable amount of interpretive
work in context. This point is neatly illustrated by Leech (1983:2324):
The indeterminacy of conversational utterances [. . .] shows itself in the NEGOTIABILITY of pragmatic factors; that is, by
leaving the force unclear, S may leave Hthe opportunity to choose between one force and another, and thus leaves part of
the responsibility of the meaning to H. For instance,
If I were you Id leave town straight away
can be interpreted according to the context as a piece of advice, a warning, or a threat. Here H, knowing something about
Ss likely intentions, may interpret it as a threat, and act on it as such; but S will always be able to claimthat it was a piece
of advice, given from the friendliest of motives.
Speech acts are a theoretical nonstarter for an argument that (im)politeness or face threat is inherent. In fact, Brown and
Levinson themselves acknowledge this in their second edition: speech act theory forces a sentence-based, speaker-oriented
mode of analysis, requiring attribution of speech act categories where our own thesis requires that utterances are often
equivocal in force (1987:10).
3.1. Yes, impoliteness is inherent in linguistic expressions
For the purposes of this section and in tune with the literature discussed within it, I will take a traditional viewof inherent
meaning that is, viewing it as formal semantic meaning which is more a matter of truth conditions than felicity conditions,
more conventional than non-conventional, and more non-contextual (and thus non-relative) than contextual (such a viewis
espoused in, for example, the writings of Gottlob Frege). In Gricean terms, the focus is on what is said, which is closely
related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) uttered, along with their syntax (Grice, 1989:25; see also
Grice, 1989:87), as opposed to what is implicated, whether conventionally or non-conventionally. Of course, the line
between semantic meaning (encompassing what is sometimes referred to as encoded, literal or explicit meaning) and
pragmatic meaning is highly controversial, and has been a topic of hot debate in recent years.
3
One cannot nd any mainstream politeness theorist explicitly arguing that either politeness or impoliteness is wholly
inherent in linguistic expressions. However, the focus on linguistic expressions in earlier works may have given the
impression that context was somehow less important. Furthermore, this impression has been articulated and perhaps
hardened in the work of other scholars. Cruse (2000:362, original emphasis), for example, comments:
Politeness is, rst and foremost, a matter of what is said, and not a matter of what is thought or believed. Leech expresses
the politeness principle thus:
(I) Minimise the expression of impolite beliefs.
This is not an ideal formulation, as politeness does not essentially concern beliefs. However, it does have the merit of
throwing the weight onto the expression. Let us rephrase the principle as follows:
(II) Choose expressions which minimally belittle the hearers status.
Infact, it ispreciselyLeechs (1983) inclusionof thetermbelief that incorporates theperceptionof participants. Intheabsenceof
this, there is noexplicit acknowledgement that the denitionof politeness or impoliteness has anythingtodowithwhat participants
mean and understand by anexpression. Without this aspect, it is difcult to account for howthe same expressioncan have different
politeness values when perceived by different people, in different situations, cultures, and so on, or even how an apparently polite
3
To elaborate, at one end, semantic minimalists (e.g. Borg, 2004; Cappelen and Lepore, 2005) accord a limited role to pragmatic processes; at the other
end, contextualists, notably Recanati (e.g. 2004), and relevance theorists (e.g. Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Carston, 2002) argue that minimal meanings are
not possiblepragmatic processes determine even the truth conditions of utterances. In the light of arguments made by the latter scholars, the notion of
what is said becomes problematic; a case is made for more pragmatic intrusion into what is said than Grice had envisaged.
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3234
expressioncanbe usedfor sarcasm. Of course, AlanCruse is a semanticist, andso it is not surprising that he views politeness through
the prism of semantics. We will see below that much scholarship has been taken up with refuting this position. However, as I will
argue, I am not convinced that it necessarily follows that politeness or impoliteness lie entirely outside the scope of semantics.
Given the fact that my denition of impoliteness in section 2 is pitched as an interpretative construct with various
contextual factors playing a role, it would seem to be a foregone conclusion that impoliteness is not inherent in linguistic
expressions. However, we should remember that my denition of inherent meaning articulated a traditional notion that
even many semanticists would not recognise as tenable. Some traditional accounts of semantics, such as Kempson (1977),
are indeed relatively restrictive. However, Kempson (e.g. 1977:8) is knowingly polemic in her restriction of semantics to a
truth-based account and a theory of semantic competence. Other key works on semantics from the same period take a very
different line. Leech ([1974] 1981:86) argues that a theory for an ideal semantic description must also relate meaning to
pragmatics the way in which sentences are actually used and interpreted in speaker-hearer communication. Palmer
argues that a restricted, non-contextual semantics, whilst justiable on methodological grounds or as a terminological issue
regarding the label semantics, should not be a form of semantics treated as more central to the study of language (1981
[1976]:50), because only a small part of meaning will ever be captured (1981:50), and it is not possible to draw a clear
theoretical division between what is in the world and what is in the language (1981:51).
3.2. No, impoliteness is not inherent in linguistic expressions
Given the fact that, as pointed out in the previous paragraphs, it is difcult to nd mainstream supporters of the wholly
inherent view, scholars who argue against politeness or impoliteness being inherent in linguistic expressions are shooting at
a straw or at least partially straw target. The earliest and clearest exponent of this view is perhaps Bruce Fraser:
[. . .] no sentence is inherently polite or impolite. We often take certain expressions to be impolite, but it is not the
expressions themselves but the conditions under which they are used that determines the judgment of politeness. (Fraser
and Nolan, 1981:96)
Sentences are not ipso facto polite [. . .] (Fraser, 1990:233)
More recent statements include the following:
My aim will be to demonstrate that, at least in English, linguistic structures do not in themselves denote politeness, but
rather that they lend themselves to individual interpretation as polite in instances of ongoing verbal interaction.
(Watts, 2003:168)
What is perceived to be (im)polite will thus ultimately rely on interactants assessments of social norms of
appropriateness that have been previously acquired in the speech events in question [. . .]. As a result, I claim with many
others that no utterance is inherently polite. (Locher, 2006:250251)
There is [. . .] no linguistic behaviour that is inherently polite or impolite. (Locher and Watts, 2008:78)
Caution is needed here as there are different shades of strength in the no camp. Richard Watts, a major player in recent
work on politeness, writes that expressions lend themselves to individual interpretation (2003:168, my emphasis), which
suggests that they play some part in determining the interpretation of politeness, and indeed he describes in his book how
some expressions constrain interpretation by virtue of the fact that they encode procedural meaning (Blakemore, 1987).
Approaches topoliteness that emphasisetheroleof context aresometimes referredtoas post-modern or discursive (e.g.
Eelen, 2001; Locher, 2006; Mills, 2003; Watts, 2003). As far as the label post-modern signals a concern with cultural and
individual relativismand a dislike of universalising generalisations, it is accurate, but it brings some unwantedbaggage withit,
and so I will deploy the label discursive. The general focus of the discursive approach is on the micro, that is, on participants
situatedanddynamicevaluations of politeness, not sharedconventionalisedpoliteness forms or strategies. As anantidotetothe
overly form-focused and speaker-centred classic politeness theories (and, in the case of Brown and Levinson (1987), overly
basedonassumptions about politeness universals), discursivepoliteness workhas beeneffective. However, oneconsequenceof
focusing on the dynamic and situated characteristics of politeness is that politeness is declared not to be a predictive theory
(Watts, 2003:25), or even a post-hoc descriptive one (Watts, 2003:142). As Terkoura comments (2005a:245), [w]hat we are
then left withare minute descriptions of individual encounters, but these do not in any way addup to an explanatory theory of
thephenomena under study. Holmes (2005:115) evensuggests that theanalyst is redundant if wetakethediscursivelinetoits
logical conclusion: if everything is relative [. . .] the analyst cannot legitimately attribute meaning, one wonders what, then,
does constitute a legitimate role for the analyst. However, there is a tendency in critical reactions to discursive approaches to
target extreme, even somewhat caricatured, interpretations of them, whilst ignoring the totality of what they are saying.
Discursive politeness approaches are not infact fully discursive inthe manner of, for example, the discursive approachinsocial
psychology(e.g. Edwards andPotter, 1992) (seealsoHaughs2007critique, arguingthat thediscursiveapproachtopoliteness in
incoherent). For example, Watts (e.g. 2003) andLocher (e.g. Locher, 2004; Locher andWatts, 2005) bothembrace the notionof a
(cognitive) frame (see section 5.2). By this, they account for howpeople make judgements about situations they have never
before experienced: they draw on frame-based knowledge about situational norms and accompanying evaluations.
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3235
Indeed, it is difcult to see howcommunication could proceed without some shared conventions of meaning. Both Lewis
(1969), the seminal work on convention, and Clark (1996), a comprehensive treatment of interactional pragmatics, argue
that such conventions enable participants to coordinate their thoughts and actions. In contrast, discursive studies downplay,
partly for rhetorical reasons, shared conventions of meaning, instead emphasizing that meanings are very unstable,
negotiable, and fuzzy and that communication is a very uncertain business. In fact, shared conventions of meaning mediated
by multiple modalities, each of which may and often do act to reinforce each other, make for much more stability and
certainty than one might expect from reading discursive studies. Archer and Akert (1980) conducted three extensive
empirical tests, involving around 1000 informants and their unstructured comments on twenty thirty-second video-taped
sequences of naturalistic face-to-face interaction. The tests exposed the informants to just a segment of the interaction,
whether a temporal segment or a particular channel (a verbal transcript, transcript plus audio, etc.), after which they were
asked interpretative questions concerning what was happening in the interaction. They found:
(1) that most or even all pieces of an interaction can contain the information necessary for interpretation, and (2) that
interpretations based on a very small piece of an interaction can be virtually as accurate as interpretations based on the
whole interaction. (1980:413)
They point out that perfect conditions for reception rarely obtain in real life, and yet we frequently are able to interpret an
act sequence of behaviour even if we have not observed it perfectly (1980:414, original emphasis). Social interaction, they say,
contains an extraordinary degree of informational redundancy (1980:414). They argue that their research shows that
people encode meaningful, appropriate behaviours into each of a bewildering number of pieces some of themvery small
of an interaction (1980:415), and they do this unconsciously, as to do otherwise would be overwhelming. Archer and Akert
(1980), of course, is not the only study to have investigated multi-modal redundancy. For example, Bavelas and Chovil
(2000:186187) report two studies which both suggest that redundancy is at least 60% (i.e. there is a 60% overlap between
what non-verbal signals are conveying and what the words convey).
Perhaps the most compelling evidence requiring us to re-think at least an extreme version of the discursive approach is
intuitivethe commonplace fact that people have opinions about how different expressions relate to different degrees of
politeness or impoliteness out of context, and often opinions which are similar to others sharing their communities. They
must have some kind of semantic knowledge; or, to put it another way, the pragmatics of these expressions must be
semantically encoded in some way.
3.3. Yes and no, impoliteness is partly inherent in linguistic expressions
Perhaps the clearest statement of the dual view appears in Leech (1983). Here, Leech distinguishes between absolute
politeness and relative politeness. Absolute politeness is: a scale, or rather a set of scales [. . .], having a negative and
positive pole. Some illocutions (e.g. orders) are inherently impolite, and others (e.g. offers) are inherently polite (1983:83).
Relative politeness is politeness relative to context or situation (1983:102), to some norm of behaviour which, for a
particular setting, [people] regard as typical (1983:84). Leech (1983:102) provides the following illustration:
In an absolute sense, [1] Just be quiet is less polite than [2] Would you please be quiet for a moment? But there are occasions
where [1] could be too polite, and other occasions where [2] would not be polite enough. There are even some cases where
[2] would strike one as less polite than [1]; where, for example, [1] was interpreted as a formof banter, and where [2] was
used ironically.
Leechs examples also include cross-cultural politeness variation. More recently, Leech (2007) changed the labels of these
two types of politeness to a semantic politeness scale and a pragmatic politeness scale, and claried that these are two
ways of looking at politeness (2007:174); that is, there is no claim that there are two discrete types of politeness.
Leech, of course, is not the only person to argue for a dual view. Craig et al. (1986:456, original emphasis) put it in this way:
The difculty of rating politeness independently of appropriateness suggests that a distinction should be made between
politeness as a systemof message strategies and politeness as a social judgment. Politeness strategies can be identied in
messages, albeit often with some difculty, with limited use of context. Politeness judgments, on the other hand, are
highly context-dependent, perhaps highly variable social-cognitive phenomena. Politeness judgments, although
inuenced by politeness strategies, are far from wholly determined by them.
Note that although the distinction is proposed, it is acknowledged that there is some difculty in maintaining it. Indeed, in
the years following the 1980s research cited here, there was a shift in the way language and context are conceptualised. The
papers in Duranti and Goodwin (1992), for example, emphasised that context is dynamic and constructed in situ, and that
language and context are not two separate entities but rather held in a mutually dependent relationship. In fact, the role of
language in constructing context had been clearly agged for many years in Gumperzs (e.g. 1982) work on
contextualisation cues.
My own position is dual in the sense that I see semantic (im)politeness and pragmatic (im)politeness as inter-dependent
opposites on a scale. (Im)politeness can be more inherent in a linguistic expression or can be more determined by context,
but neither the expression nor the context guarantee an interpretation of (im)politeness. What is different about semantic
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3236
(im)politeness from, say, the semantics of the noun table is that it is the relationship between the expression and its
interpersonal contextual effects that must be the central semanticised component for it to exist. If impoliteness is dened as
a negative evaluative attitude evoked by certainsituated communicative behaviours, then an expression that did not in some
way link itself to interpersonal context could hardly be inherently impolite. Expressions can be semanticized for
impoliteness effects to varying degrees. This is spelt out and illustrated by Terkoura (2008:74, footnote 27):
Paralleling what happens with face-constituting expressions that may be conventionalised to a higher or lower degree,
swear words may semantically encode face-threat, but other constructions may simply pragmatically implicate face-threat
in a generalised manner on a par with generalised conversational implicatures of politeness (Terkoura, 2003, 2005b).
The following sections consider this conventionalisation more closely.
4. Conventionalised politeness formulae and their basis
Terkouras (e.g. 2001, 2002, 2005a) frame-based approach to politeness does not appeal to general or potentially
problematic notions such as indirectness or pragmatic politeness strategies. Instead, she argues that we should analyse the
concrete linguistic realisations (i.e. formulae) and particular contexts of use which co-constitute frames. Moreover, [i]t is the
regular co-occurrence of particular types of context and particular linguistic expressions as the unchallenged realisations of
particular acts that create the perception of politeness (2005a:248; see also 2005b:213). The fact that the formulae are not
only associated with a particular context but go unchallenged is an important point. This feature seems to be similar to
Haughs (2007:312) claim that evidence of politeness can be found in, amongst other things, the reciprocation of concern
evident in the adjacent placement of expressions of concern relevant to the norms invoked in that particular interaction.
Terkoura suggests that it is through this regularity of co-occurrence that we acquire a knowledge of which expressions to
use in which situations (2002:197), that is, experientially acquired structures of anticipated default behaviour
(2002:197). She also points out that formulae are more easily processed by both speaker and hearer, when juggling face
concerns, goals, and so on, and also that using them demonstrates a knowledge of community norms (2002:196). Thus,
formulaic speech carries the burden of polite discourse (2002:197; see also references given in 2005b:213). The fact that
this is so accounts for the observation that politeness often passes unnoticed (Kasper, 1990:193).
Terkoura (2005b:213; see also 2001:130) denes conventionalisation as:
a relationship holding between utterances and context, which is a correlate of the (statistical) frequency with which an
expression is used in ones experience of a particular context. Conventionalisation is thus a matter of degree, and may well
vary in different speakers, as well as for the same speaker over time. This does not preclude the possibility that a
particular expression may be conventionalised in a particular context for virtually all speakers of a particular language,
thereby appearing to be a convention of the language.
Note that there is a scale of conventionalisation: pragmatic meanings can become more semanticized (i.e. conventional for the
majorityof thespeakers of thelanguage). Terkouraargues that it is thepotential for variation[which] keeps conventionalised
inferences apart fromconventional ones (Strawson, 1964) (2005c:298). We can illustrate this with respect to impoliteness. In
British culture, asserting that somebody is a cunt, motherfucker or wanker deploys impoliteness formulae which are
relatively semantically encodedinterms of their impolite effects across a range of contexts. But not all, which is partly why it is
more appropriate to view impoliteness, and politeness, formulae as conventionalised rather than fully conventional or
semantic. For example, cunt was generally viewed as the most offensive word in British English in the year 2000 (Millwood-
Hargrave, 2000). Now consider the nal sentences of this diary report from a British undergraduate:
A close friend of mine fromNorway was eating with myself and my parents. They asked about our shared friends and my
friend (Eddie) began to tell anecdotes about them. Throughout this point he used the word cunt repeatedly. I felt very
embarrassed as I knew that Eddie uses this word in the place of words like guy and dude. In our circle of friends Hi
cunt was a friendly greeting.
What I have been referring to as conventionalised meaning (as opposed to conventional meaning) sits midway between
semantics and pragmatics, between fully conventionalised and non-conventionalized meanings (Levinson, 2000:25). The
kind of conventionalised formulae I have been describing above, where the pragmatic meaning is conventionally
associated with an expression, has been accounted for within Neo-Gricean pragmatics (e.g. Levinson, 2000). An elegant
Neo-Gricean account of the pragmatic inferencing pertaining to conventionalised politeness formulae (involving a
generalised conversational implicature), and also of the inferencing that takes place in achieving politeness when such
formulae are absent (involving a particularised conversational implicature), is given in Terkoura (e.g. 2001, 2005b, and
especially 2003).
The general idea here of co-occurrence regularities between language forms and specic contexts is a familiar one in the
world of sociolinguistics. It is out of this regularity that sociolinguistic resources develop. Consider, for example, how
Bakhtin s (1986:60, original emphasis) notion of speech genres captures such regularities: Each separate utterance is
individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances.
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3237
Furthermore, such formulae resonate with much earlier work within interactional sociolinguistics. They are similar to
Gumperzs notion of contextualisation cues (e.g. 1982). Gumperz (1982:162, my emphasis) elaborates:
The identication of specic conversational exchanges as representative of socio-culturally familiar activities is the
process I have called contextualisation [. . .]. It is the process by which we evaluate message meaning and sequencing
patterns in relation to aspects of the surface structure of the message, called contextualisation cues. The linguistic basis
for this matching procedure resides in cooccurrence expectations, which are learned in the course of previous interactive
experience and form part of our habitual and instinctive linguistic knowledge. Cooccurrence expectations enable us to
associate styles in speaking with contextual presuppositions. We regularly rely upon these matching processes in everyday
conversation. Although they are rarely talked about and tend to be noticed only when things go wrong, without themwe
would be unable to relate what we hear to previous experience.
5. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae and their basis
5.1. Frequency-in-context and impoliteness formulae
Not surprisingly, given her focus on politeness, Terkoura concentrates on statistical regularities of usage: politeness is
not a matter of rational calculation, but of habits (2005a:250); Empirically, frames take the formof observable regularities
of usage (2001:185). Could conventionalised impoliteness formulae have the same basis as that argued for politeness
formulae? Are they conventionalised frequency correlations between forms and particular contexts? My argument is that
impoliteness cannot be adequately treated thus.
A particular problem is that impoliteness formulae are much less frequent than politeness formulae. Leech (1983:105)
states that conictive illocutions tend, thankfully, to be rather marginal to human linguistic behaviour in normal
circumstances. It is difcult to see how society would function if people were impolite (and perceived to be so) most of the
time. This is a reason why Leechs statement is likely to be correct. Finding solid empirical evidence to support it is not easy.
In my own everyday interactions (e.g. interacting with my family, buying a ticket for the bus, talking to colleagues at work),
examples of impoliteness are relatively rare. I have some evidence that they are similarly rare for others. I collected a 100
diary-type reports of impoliteness events in which students were involved. Although the students were given a week or
more in which to report such events, many told me that they failed to nd one to report (despite there being a nancial
incentive to do so!). In fact, I ended up administering, with the help of colleagues, report-forms to well over 1000 students in
order to gain 100 completions. Further evidence may also be in the fact that the icons of English politeness please and thank
you occur so much more frequently than possible icons of impoliteness such as cunt and motherfucker (the two British English
lexical items considered most offensive in the year 2000, according to Millwood-Hargrave, 2000). In the two-billion word
Oxford English Corpus the frequencies are: please (14,627), thank you (5533), cunt (157) and motherfucker (88). Of course,
there is no guarantee that all these instances of usage actually involved politeness or impoliteness (some might have been,
for example, sarcasm or banter), but, given the huge frequency differentials, there seems to be support for the idea that
impoliteness is relatively rare in terms of its general frequency. Moreover, one cannot dismiss the infrequency of cunt and
motherfucker as being an artefact of the particular composition of the OEC. The OEC includes very informal, unregulated and
unedited texts. For example, it contains approximately 150 million words of weblog and chatroom discussion (see http://
www.askoxford.com/oec, for further details). Such computer-mediated interaction is relatively dense in impoliteness
phenomena, as is testied by Locher (2010), a journal special issue on politeness and impoliteness in computer-mediated
communication.
Impoliteness, however, does play a central role and is relatively frequent in specic discourses, such as army recruit
training, interactions between car owners and trafc wardens, exploitative TV, and so on (see, for example, Culpeper et al.,
2003:15451546; Bouseld, 2008)contexts to which perhaps my students and I are not very often party. The crucial point
about conventionality discussed in the previous section is that it relates to specic contexts of use. For impoliteness
formulae, these abnormal circumstances are indeed such specic contexts. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae can
and do develop here, and I will pursue this avenue in section 6.2. Where there is an interesting point of difference with
politeness formulae is that people acquire a knowledge of impoliteness formulae that far exceeds their own direct experience
of usage of formulae associated with impolite effects in such contexts. This, I argue, is because they also draw upon indirect
experience, and in particular metadiscourse.
5.2. Impoliteness metadiscourse
Indirect experience of impoliteness formulae includes experience of discourse about impoliteness discourse, i.e.
impoliteness metadiscourse. It is in such metadiscourse that impoliteness formulae are mentioned rather than used. Indirect
experience is accommodated within Terkouras framework. She notes:
In acquiring language both by hearing it and by actively producing it, speakers develop repertoires of frames which
include frames of which they only have a passive knowledge. For example, in sexually segregated societies, men will be
aware of womens ways of speaking, although they themselves will not use them. (2001:182)
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3238
However, Terkoura does not dwell on indirect experience or metadiscourse, and her analyses are focussed squarely on
direct experiencenone of which is surprising, given that she focuses on politeness. Impoliteness, in contrast, casts a much
larger shadowthan its frequency of usage would suggest. Behaviours and expressions considered impolite are more noticed
and discussed than politeness (cf. Watts, 2003:5). Impoliteness formulae are far from marginal in terms of their
psychological salience, because their very abnormality (relative to their general frequency of use) attracts attentionthey
are foregrounded against the generally expected state for conversation, namely, politeness (Fraser, 1990:233). Not
surprisingly, then, they are commented on and debated in all types of media, in ofcial documents and in everyday chat, and
so on. However, psychological salience is only part of what is going on here. Metadiscourse plays a role in the group dynamic
that gives rise to a behaviour being evaluated as impolite in the rst place.
Whilst any specic usage of impoliteness can be described in terms of face damage to individuals (as demonstrated in, for
example, Bouseld, 2008), those usages often have reverberations some of which are articulated in impoliteness
metadiscourse for the broader community in which they take place. Jaworski et al. (2004:3, original emphasis) make a
useful comment on the general role of metadiscourse:
Metalinguistic representations may enter public consciousness and come to constitute structured understandings,
perhaps even common sense understandings of how language works, what it is usually like, what certain ways of
speaking connote and imply, what they ought to be like.
The important point here is that we gain understandings of what language is usually like and what certain ways of
speaking connote and imply without recourse to the frequency of direct experience. Note that the argument is not merely
that metadiscourse is a reex of behaviours, but that metadiscourse comes to constitute structured understandings,
including, in particular, understandings about what certain ways of speaking ought to be like. A case where impoliteness
is clearly linked to the social oughts of metadiscourse concerns rules. Rules proscribing behaviours considered impolite are
a kind of metadiscourse articulated and imposed by institutions (e.g. schools, the workplace, public service entities,
government agencies) on various others, by adults on children, teachers on pupils, and so on. Such rules are part of our social
morality. Lewis (1969:103) states that rules codify regularities of behaviour. However, it is also possible to have rules that
people regularly ignore. Rules do not depend on regularities, but arise fromsocial norms. Anderson (2000:17) denes a social
norm as a standard of behaviour shared by a social group, commonly understood by its members as authoritative or
obligatory for them. Let us consider social norms and the group dynamic that drives metadiscourse a little more closely,
turning in particular to Margaret Gilberts (1989) classic book On Social Facts.
Margaret Gilbert (1989:377) proposes that:
our everyday concept of a social convention is that of a jointly accepted principle of action, a group at with respect to
how one is to act in certain situations.[. . .] Further, each party to the convention will accept that each one personally
ought to conform, other things being equal, where the ought is understood to be based on the fact that together they
jointly accepted the principle. (1989:377).
The focus here is not on the individual but on the group. Her argument is that belonging to a social group is part and parcel of
accepting the norms that constitute it, and adopting a groups at is a matter of making manifest ones willingness to do so.
Peopleare not fundamentallydrivenbyself-interest or the fear of sanctions, but bythe staketheyhaveingalvanisingthat social
conventionintherst place. That stakeis todowithgroupmembership, withpeoples senseof identitywithvarious groups (see
relatedpoints madeinTerkoura, 2002). Gilbert (1989:377) notes that nonconformingbehaviour, as indeedimpoliteness often
is, provokes strongreactions becauseit raises questions of relationships toothers andalsowhat kindof behaviour is appropriate
given those relationships. So, impoliteness metadiscourse (e.g. condemning an impoliteness behaviour, upholding a rule) can
be driven by the need to demonstrate ones orientation to a group and the norms by which it is constituted.
Where Gilberts (1989) account has something of a decit, in my view, is that it skates over the unequal inuence
particular groups have (and individuals in groups have) in reproducing and imposing social norms. Impoliteness rules and
punitive sanctions are unidirectional: they are imposed by the more powerful on the less. The issue here is of dominant
ideologies, belief systems that can sustain and normalise the social conventions that serve power hierarchies. Silverstein
(1998) stresses the importance of ideology in relation to indexical processes, indexicals, as Silverstein denes them, having a
strong afnity with Gumperzs (e.g. 1982) notion of contextualisation cues (cf. Mertz, 1998:152) and thus also my
understanding of conventionalised impoliteness. He writes:
ideologies present invokable schemata in which to explain/interpret the meaningful ow of indexicals. As such, they are
necessary to and drive default modes of the gelling of this owinto textlike chunks. Ideologies are, thus, conceptualized as
relatively perduring with respect to the indexicals-in-context that they construe. And we recognise such schemata
characteristically by the way that they constitute rationalizing, systematizing, and, indeed most importantly, naturalizing
schemata: schemata that explain the indexical value of signs in terms of some order(s) of phenomena stipulatively
presupposable by hence, in context, autonomous of the indexical phenomena to be understood. (1998:129, original
emphasis)
Note that such ideologies echo Jaworski, Coupland and Galasin skis common sense understandings (2004:3). Ideologies
are involved in explaining/interpreting what counts as conventionalized impoliteness in particular contexts. For example, a
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3239
ve-year old boy in a swimming pool changing room in the UK said to his father: I want my Kinder chocolate right now.
To which, his father replied: Youre not getting anything if youre being rude. The boys use of a relatively direct request
(I want X) coupled with the aggravator right now transgressed the ideologically natural, non-negotiable order whereby
in the interpersonal context of the family certain members are accorded certain forms of language with certain indexical
values, and transgressions count as rude, impolite, etc., evidence for which is displayed in the fathers metadiscourse.
4
Although Terkoura does not deploy the label ideology, her framework encompasses the evaluative beliefs a community
has that something is (un)acceptable in a particular context. When one learns a conventionally polite expression, one learns
the evaluative judgment in the community that expression counts as polite in that context (cf. Terkoura, 2001:142143).
More specically, she deploys the notion of frame (which, as we saw, do Locher and Watts, 2005) to help capture this
evaluative link between language and context. There clearly is some overlap here with the notion of ideology. My
understanding of ideology is that of van Dijk (e.g. 1987, 1988), who takes a socio-cognitive view drawing on schema theory
(e.g. Bartlett, [1932] 1995; Rumelhart, 1984), something which makes it broadly compatible with the notion of frame.
According to Eysenck and Keane (2010:401), schemata are well-integrated packets of knowledge about the world, events,
people, and actions, and include what are often referred to as scripts and frames. van Dijk argues that evaluative beliefs can
be represented as attitude schemata and these provide the foundation needed to assess the (inter)subjective position of
social members towards behaviours (van Dijk, 1987:189). As I suggested in section 2, impoliteness can be considered a kind
of attitude, more precisely, an attitude schema comprised of certain evaluative beliefs concerning certain behaviours. It is
clusters of attitudes shared amongst members of a social group which constitute ideologies (van Dijk, 1988, 1990), and could
be labelled, for example, conservative, racist or sexist. Some attitudes constitute impoliteness ideologies, which play
a role in determining what counts as impolite and sustain and are sustained through metadiscourse by those who dominate
the particular group power structures. Insults, for example, particularly those involving social identities and face (e.g. racist
and sexist insults), can be a means of controlling others as well as maintaining dominant groups in society at the expense of
others.
6. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae in English: methodological approaches and ndings
Following on from the arguments presented thus far, two (inter-connected) methods for identifying conventionalised
impoliteness formulae present themselves:
1. Study those specic contexts in which participant(s) regularly display an understanding that something impolite was
expressed (what expressions were used, if any?).
2. Study the metadiscourse concerning behaviours understood to be impolite (what expressions are they talking about, if
any?).
The rst method is akin to that adopted by Terkoura (e.g. 2001) for politeness formulae. I will concentrate on a version of this
method in section 6.2, but rst I briey illustrate the second method.
6.1. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae and metadiscourse
In this section, I explore general impoliteness rules which apply to a variety of contexts, including private contexts, that is,
in-group contexts involving, for example, friends or family. To do this, I will survey a rudeness manual designed for
everyday contexts. It concerns American English and relates to the North American cultural context.
Montrys (2002) How To Be Rude! A Training Manual for Mastering the Art of Rudeness is a humorous parody of etiquette
manuals. Instead of training the reader in polite behaviours, it trains them in impolite behaviours. Each page contains an
imperative statement. The book is a list of dos rather than donts (the stuff of politeness manuals). Of course, one might
be concerned that these are not real rules. However, the success of the humour depends on the reader recognising the rule
that has been recommended for breakingthey must ring true. The following items are quoted from the chapter General
Rudeness (pp. 150). I have not included items which overlap with others or which could be non-communicative behaviours
(e.g. sneezing without covering your mouth). The groupings of the items and italicised labels are mine (I have inserted
punctuation between the two parts of most entries so they make sense when presented as continuous lines).
Patronising behaviour (including condescending, belittling, ridiculing and demeaning behaviours): Producing or perceiving a
display of power that infringes an understood power hierarchy
Be really condescending; example: What would YOU know about that? (p. 2)
Treat people in a service capacity as if they are beneath you; whenever possible, use terms like the little people or the
help. (p. 40)
When dining in a restaurant, snap your ngers at the waiter when you want something. (p. 41)
Make fun of people: laugh loudly and point. (p. 4)
4
In the terms of Terkouras (e.g. 2003) framework, the boys utterance breaks the relevant politeness frame, thus triggering a particularised implicature
of impoliteness.
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3240
Talk loudly and slowly to people who speak a different language; use exaggerated hand gestures. (p. 7)
Insults (including derogatory statements and implications): Producing or perceiving a display of low values for some target
Make derogatory statements about people of another race, religion, or lifestyle, preferably when those people are within
earshot. (p. 6)
Ask an overweight woman when she is due. (p. 28)
Ask any stay-at-home Mom what she does all day. (p. 29)
Pointed criticism(including expressions of disapproval and statements of fault, weakness or disadvantage): Producing or perceiving
a display of low values for some target
Criticise: earn extra points if you make someone cry. (p. 33)
Encroachment: Producing or perceiving a display of infringement of personal space (literal or metaphorical)
Encroach on someones personal space; remember, the minimum radius is two feet. (p. 8)
Eavesdrop then turn around and add your opinion to the conversation. (p. 9)
Snoop: anything that you have no business looking into would be appropriate. (p. 24)
Ask people how much theyve paid for stuff; be persistent. (p. 14)
Call people before 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday or Sunday morning. (p. 15)
Exclusion (including failure to include and disassociation): Producing or perceiving a display of infringement of inclusion
Talk about people in the third person whilst theyre standing next to you. (p. 3)
Failure to reciprocate: Producing or perceiving a display of infringement of the reciprocity norm
NEVER write a thank-you note. (p. 23)
Even frommy British cultural perspective, I have no difculty at all in recognising these rules. Interestingly, all of the items can be
accommodated within my earlier work (e.g. 1996) which proposed a taxonomy of impoliteness strategies. In fact, the pragmatic
level is precisely the level at which I think this method can make the greatest contribution: it is good at capturing pragmatic
strategies in which impoliteness formulae may or may not be embedded.
6.2. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae and frequency in impoliteness contexts
Data is a major problem for impoliteness research. Discourse completion tasks and role plays, amongst the most
frequently used methodologies in quantitative politeness research, are problematic, since people are particularly reluctant
to be recorded producing impoliteness, and there are ethical considerations as well. For the same reasons, it is also very
difcult to collect naturally-occurring data. However, I have collected the following datasets (all in the public domain):
1. Tapped phone calls. Available as part of courtroom transcripts in North America (e.g. www.courttv.com; some sound les
are available), particularly those submitted as evidence because they are deemed threatening or abusive.
2. Fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Approximately 20 h from programmes about army recruit training (Soldiers, Soldiers To Be,
Soldier Girls and Red Caps); approximately 10 h from programmes about trafc wardens (Clampers and Car Wars).
3. Fly-on-the-wall pseudo-documentaries. Fly-on-the-wall recordings of contrived situations designed to spark conict;
approximately 10 h (Wife Swap and Supernanny).
4. Exploitative TV shows. Approximately 12 h from a quiz show (The Weakest Link) and a talent show (Pop Idol).
5. Grafti dialogues. 51 grafti dialogues collected fromLancaster University library desks by Chris Hayes (a former student).
These data are largely drawn from UK-based cultures, including a mix of genders, social classes and ages. Some data are North
American. These data predominantly concern contexts where social conventions sustaining polite behaviours are outed by those
in power in order to coerce (as for example in threatening phone calls) or entertain (as for example the exploitative TV shows);
where social conventions legitimate impolite behaviours (as for example in army training); or where misunderstandings about
what the social conventions are arise. In addition, and in order to make up for a decit regarding everyday data, I used my diary-
report data, that is, 100 accounts of offensive interactions elicited from undergraduate students.
The procedure I adopted for identifying candidates for conventionalised impoliteness formulae begins by collecting
specic utterances within the above data to which somebody, typically the target, displayed evidence that they took the
utterance as impolite. This, of course, begs the question of what that evidence was. My sources of evidence, ordered in terms
of their weight in guiding my interpretation, were as follows:
1. Co-text,
2. Retrospective comments, and
3. Certain non-verbal reactions.
These points capture the idea that people react to impoliteness in certain ways, not least of all through the articulation of an
emotional response. The rst point, co-text, is a hugely valuable source of participant understandings. A participants
(prototypically the targets) or observers evaluation that something was impolite, sometimes including explicit impoliteness
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3241
metapragmatic comments and/or metadiscourse (e.g. that was bloody rude), gives us good evidence that impoliteness offence
was taken. The second and third points are in some ways subcategories of the rst. By retrospective comments I am referring to
comments made after the interactional event in question. These often take the shape of long discussions by participants and/or
observers about whether X counts as impolite. Regarding non-verbal reactions, impoliteness is associated with certain emotional
reactions, and sometimes those emotions are evident in particular non-verbal actions (e.g. looking downwards, biting ones lip)
(though we need to be wary of the fact that non-verbal emotion displays can also be strategically controlled to some extent).
As I accumulated candidates for impoliteness formulae, I grouped them according to structural commonalities. What I
have in mind here is the Pattern Grammar of Gill Francis and Susan Hunston (Francis et al., 1996, 1998; Hunston and Francis,
2000). Hunston and Francis dene a pattern as:
a phraseology frequently associated with (a sense of) a word, particularly in terms of the prepositions, groups, and clauses
that followthe word. Patterns and lexis are mutually dependent, in that each pattern occurs with a restricted set of lexical
items, and each lexical item occurs with a restricted set of patterns. (2000:3)
The pattern of a word can be dened as all the words and structures which are regularly associated with the word and
which contribute to its meaning. A pattern can be identied if a combination of words occurs relatively frequently, if it is
dependent on a particular word choice, and if there is a clear meaning associated with it. (2000:37)
Patterns are sets of words which are semantically congruent in some way and which have grammatically patterned co-texts.
They create specic meanings as a whole. Meaning is understood to include pragmatic meanings (see in particular Stubbs,
2001). In this approach to grammar, there is no clear borderline between syntactic and lexical structures, something which
echoes other approaches including, for example, Construction Grammar (e.g. Goldberg, 1995).
I have also checked the robustness of all impoliteness formulae in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), with the exception
of the category involving questions or presuppositions. I operated the criterion that at least 50% of any one formulas
variants had to involve impoliteness in more than 50% of the OECs instances, that is, those instances had to be
accompanied by evidence that they were interpreted as impoliteness (where the number of OEC instances was
overwhelming, I analysed the rst 100). For example, for the formula shut up, only one other variant emerged, namely,
shut the fuck up. Shut up has a strong correlation with impoliteness events in the OEC data, but does not clearly exceed the
50% level (it can express, for instance, solidarity). In contrast, shut the fuck up, has a stronger correlation, clearly
exceeding 50%.
5
Hence, this formula type is listed. The conventionalised impoliteness formulae identied thus are as
follows. Square brackets are designed to give an indication of some of the structural characteristics of the formulae (ner
grained structural analyses are possible, including a consideration of the degree of optionality each element has).
Alternatives are indicated with slashes.
Insults
1. Personalized negative vocatives
- [you] [fucking/rotten/dirty/fat/little/etc.] [moron/fuck/plonker/dickhead/berk/pig/shit/bastard/loser/liar/minx/brat/
slut/squirt/sod/bugger, etc.] [you]
2. Personalized negative assertions
- [you] [are] [so/such a] [shit/stink/thick/stupid/bitchy/bitch/hypocrite/disappointment/gay/nuts/nuttier than a fruit
cake/hopeless/pathetic/fussy/terrible/fat/ugly/etc.]
- [you] [cant do] [anything right/basic arithmetic/etc.]
- [you] [disgust me/make me] [sick/etc.]
3. Personalized negative references
- [your] [stinking/little] [mouth/act/arse/body/corpse/hands/guts/trap/breath/etc.]
4. Personalized third-person negative references (in the hearing of the target)
- [the] [daft] [bimbo]
- [she] [s] [nutzo]
Pointed criticisms/complaints
- [that/this/it] [is/was] [absolutely/extraordinarily/unspeakably/etc.] [bad/rubbish/crap/horrible/terrible/etc.]
Challenging or unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions
- why do you make my life impossible?
- which lie are you telling me?
- whats gone wrong now?
- you want to argue with me or you want to go to jail?
5
It is worth noting points made by Biber (2009:280281), namely that, whilst patterns clearly involve frequency, in practice pattern grammar studies
have not provided evidence of frequency, and indeed some corpus linguists have argued that for something to count as recurrent it only needs to occur more
than twice.
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3242
Condescensions (see also the use of little in Personalized negative references)
- [that] [s/is being] [babyish/childish/etc.]
Message enforcers
- listen here (preface)
- you got [it/that]? (tag)
- do you understand [me]? (tag)
Dismissals
- [go] [away]
- [get] [lost/out]
- [fuck/piss/shove] [off]
Silencers
- [shut] [it]/[your] [stinking/fucking/etc.] [mouth/face/trap/etc.]
- shut [the fuck] up
Threats
- [Ill/Im/were] [gonna] [smash your face in/beat the shit out of you/box your ears/bust your fucking head off/straighten
- you out/etc.] [if you dont] [X]
- [X] [before I] [hit you/strangle you]
Negative expressives (e.g. curses, ill-wishes)
- [go] [to hell/hang yourself/fuck yourself]
- [damn/fuck] [you]
Of course, this list reects regularities in my data; it is not a list of all English conventionalised impoliteness formulae.
Having said that, I would be surprised if this list did not include many very generally used English conventionalised
impoliteness formulae. Conversely, some items that one might expect to be included are not, simply because they did not
occur frequently enough. For example, taboo words or behaviours can trigger a judgement of impoliteness, but they seem
to do this per se extremely rarelya mere two cases occurred in 100 diary reports. In most cases taboo words operate in
conjunction with impoliteness formulae such as those above. Some of the conventionalised impoliteness formulae listed
may look somewhat innocuous, that is, relatively context-dependent for their impoliteness effects. However, as items
conventionalised in spoken interaction for impoliteness effects they will have consistent prosodic and nonverbal support
(e.g. sharply falling intonation, tense voice quality, increased loudness, frowning and pointing). Inconsistent
accompanying prosodic and nonverbal signals are likely to suggest that the impoliteness is non-genuine, that it is,
for example, banter, and thus would not be a feature of the kind of impoliteness events I am dealing with here.
7. Conclusion
Having offered a brief denition of impoliteness, I began this paper by considering arguments for politeness being wholly
inherent in linguistic expressions. In fact, it is very difcult to nd mainstream supporters of this position. Discursive
scholars who oppose it are, to an extent, shooting at a straw target. Discursive work, perhaps by denition, is focused on
dynamic, locally constructed meanings. However, I argued that critics of discursive work have also been shooting at
something of a straw target, as such approaches do accommodate norms. Nevertheless, the impression discursive
approaches give is of great instability of meaning and uncertainty in communication. This impression does not square with
the intuitions we share with others in our communities about conventionalised meanings even out of context, nor with the
evidence for a large amount of informational redundancy in multi-modal communicationall of which points towards
stability and certainty (though of course these can never be absolute). My own position might be described as dual: there is a
semantic side and a pragmatic side to impoliteness, both being interdependent opposites on a scale, neither guaranteeing an
interpretation that something is impolite in context.
A conventionalised impoliteness formula is a form of language in which context-specic impoliteness effects are
conventionalised. I approached this issue via conventionalised politeness formulae, reporting the work of Marina Terkoura,
where it is argued that they arise as a result of regularities of co-occurrence between unchallenged expressions and particular
types of context. My next step was to take this forward with respect to impoliteness. The problem here is that people have
knowledge of impoliteness formulaewhichfar exceeds their direct experienceof them. So, frequencycannot bethe sole or even
dominant factor in their conventionalisation. I argued that indirect experiences play a key role in the conventionalisation of
impoliteness formulae, and especially experience of metadiscourse (e.g. comments, debates and rules about impoliteness
events). This metadiscourseis thelongshadowof impoliteness behaviours. It is partlydrivenbythesalienceof anyimpoliteness
behaviour, but alsobythe fact that that metadiscourse is part of the social dynamic that makes a behaviour count as impolite in
the rst place. Impoliteness behaviours rupture social normsprinciples of action jointly accepted by members of groups who
J. Culpeper / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 32323245 3243
demonstrate their group membership by upholding those principles in impoliteness metadiscourse. I also argued that these
social norms are part of and underpinned by ideologies, particularly dominant ideologies, and those ideologies are involved in
determining, not least of all via impoliteness metadiscourse, what counts as impoliteness.
I proposed two methodologies for investigating conventionalised impoliteness formulae, one being to investigate the
expressions to which impoliteness metadiscourse orients, and the other being to focus on regularities of expression in
impoliteness contexts. I provided a brief demonstration of howthe rst method might proceed. Alimitation of this method is
that whilst good at revealing pragmatic strategies those strategies may or may not have specic linguistic expressions
embedded within them. An enormous quantity of data would be required to see but a few trends regarding impoliteness
formulae. The second method focussed on contexts associated with impoliteness events. I collected utterances accompanied
by participant evidence that somebody had construed them as impolite. With Pattern Grammar in mind, I then generated a
list of conventionalised impoliteness formulae in English. Of course, all of these items would benet fromfurther renement
and validation (for example, there is great variation in the optionality of the elements which constitute a formula). The fact
that my list of conventionalised impoliteness formulae was devised on the basis of frequency in specic types of context is
something that it has in common with Terkouras account of politeness formulae. Froma methodological point of view, this
is the most effective way to identify impoliteness formulae.
Finally, it should be further stressed that conventionalised impoliteness formulae are not the only means of triggering
attributions of impolitenessthey can also be triggered by something non-verbal or by an implication. But conventionalised
impoliteness formulae exist and are important. They can be creatively exploited, either by breaking the formula itself or by
deploying a formula so that there is a mismatch between the context it projects and the communicative situation in which it
is contextualised, or between the context projected by one formula and that projected by its co-textcases which give rise to
phenomena such as sarcasm or banter.
Acknowledgement
The project of which this publication is a part is funded by the U.K.s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES-
063-27-0015). I am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of this article, who went to great lengths in providing
stimulating and detailed feedback. Needless to say, remaining errors and infelicities are mine.
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Jonathan Culpeper is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. His work spans pragmatics, stylistics
and the history of English. He recently completed a three-year Research Fellowship funded by the ESRC, in which he focused on impoliteness.
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