25.431, Review: Discourse Analysis; Ling & Literature; Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics: Jobert & Jamet (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-431. Sun Jan 26 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.431, Review: Discourse Analysis; Ling & Literature; Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics: Jobert & Jamet (2013)

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Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 18:42:33
From: Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei [leilakhabbazi_o at yahoo.co.uk]
Subject: Aspects of Linguistic Impoliteness

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3165.html

EDITOR: Manuel  Jobert
EDITOR: Denis  Jamet
TITLE: Aspects of Linguistic Impoliteness
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei, University of East Anglia

SUMMARY

The publication under review consists of five thematic chapters, each
providing scholarly reflections on linguistic impoliteness. The book brings
together 15 papers discussing impoliteness from different perspectives.

The volume opens with the editors’ introduction, where they outline the scope
of the book and sketch the contents of the contributions. They point out the
main purpose of the book as bringing together linguists, discourse analysts
and literary critics to contribute to the clarification of ‘impoliteness’ as a
common research paradigm.

The first chapter, ‘General Approaches to Impoliteness and Rudeness’, consists
of three parts. The first article, by Jonathan Culpeper, is entitled
‘Impoliteness: Questions and answers’. It provides an introduction to the term
‘impoliteness’ and the reasons for the necessity of further serious studies on
this topic. Culpeper maintains that impoliteness happens when there is a
conflict between behaviours and how one expects, wants or thinks them to be.
He discusses creativity in impoliteness, and the most frequent linguistic ways
in which someone causes it. He concludes that this phenomenon needs to be
studied because of its implications for interpersonal communication and
society as a whole.

The second contribution in Chapter 1 is by Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni and is
entitled ‘Politeness, non-politeness, “polirudeness”: The case of political TV
debates’. She argues that in order to identify an utterance as polite or
impolite, its content, formulation and context of production must be taken
into account. She expands Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) notion of
politeness and introduces the notions of overpoliteness, non-politeness,
impoliteness and polirudeness. She then analyses these notions in the light of
their content, context and formulation in Nicolas Sarkozy’s debate during the
2007 French presidential elections in two different contexts.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni concludes that “avoiding behaviours that are too obviously
impolite is a “condition of felicity” for the debate (particularly in an
electoral context): if a speaker goes out of the frame of the accepted
standards his speech will be “infelicitous” -- and the participants in the
exchange will be too” (p. 42).

The last paper in Chapter 1 is by Sandrine Sorlin: ‘The power of impoliteness:
A historical perspective’. The paper describes the various meanings of
‘politeness’ throughout the ages and how (im)politeness encompasses social and
political classifications linked to power. Sorlin introduces a different
meaning of (im)politeness in which politeness can be seen as a deliberate
linguistic veiling of one’s real intentions, and impoliteness as a means of
unveiling this excessive, false politeness. She concludes that “in
establishing a cooperative code of conduct in which impolite moves are merely
perceived as violations, one can but fail to consider the virtues of
impoliteness as a powerful pragmatic force, allowing interlocutors to
renegotiate meaning” (p. 57).

Chapter 2, ‘Impoliteness in Television Series and in Drama’, has three parts.
In Part 1, ‘Dr. House and the language of offence’, Linda Pilliere examines
the TV series ‘House’ with the aim of studying how impolite language and
behaviour in a specific context creates humour. In her examples, she describes
the role of the addresser and addressee, and how their conceptual model of
context work together to create offensive language. For example, in the
following extract, House appears to conform to the context model shared by the
television audience and the addressee, but deviates at the last minute. The
offensive language becomes humorous through “the initial match of the context
and their mismatch” (p. 71).
Cuddy: You mind if I come in? 
House: Not at all. Do you mind if I leave?
(‘Dying Changes Everything’, Season 5)
 
Part 2 of the second chapter is by Manuel Jobert and is entitled ‘Domestic and
professional impoliteness in Fawlty Towers: Impoliteness as a dramatic
device’. In his article, Jobert argues that impoliteness is one of the major
sources of comedy; however, if pushed too far, it results in a communication
breakdown. Jobert specifically studies “terms of address”, domestic
impoliteness between Basil (the main character) and his wife, and the
“addressee-shift” effect in aforementioned comedy show. He concludes that in
order to preserve the comic effect of a show, it is necessary to keep the
right balance between the impoliteness conveyed in the microcosm and the
macrocosm.

The final part of Chapter 2 is by Natalie Mandon-Hunter: ‘“Polite company”:
Offensive discourse in William Congreve’s comedies’. The article looks at
Congreve’s comedies and how the dramatist achieves comic effect by using
offensive language. Mandon-Hunter shows that multiple factors are involved in
creating offensive discourse. Sometimes, insults relying on clever comparisons
bring about laughter at the expense of the target. In other cases, insults
relying on inappropriate comparisons cause laughter at the expense of the
speaker. She argues that “the more incongruous the insult, the more likely it
is to be perceived by the target as ridiculous rather than offensive” (p.
100). In any case, the target’s actual response to the offensive language, be
it silence or retaliation, indicates its affectivity.

Chapter 3, ‘Impoliteness in Literature’, looks into impoliteness used in
literary works. The chapter has four parts, opening with Brindusa Grigoriu’s
paper entitled ‘Medieval rudeness: The English version of a French romance
custom’. In this article, the writer offers a contrastive analysis of the
French and English versions of ‘Tristan and Ysolt’ using Brown and Levinson’s
“Politeness Theory”. Grigoriu points out that rudeness in medieval romances is
more than a matter of speech or attitude, and can go as far as beheading. She
maintains that the beheading custom in the Weeping Castle “is face-relevant:
it challenges “the public self-image” of Tristan and Ysolt, who embody the
ideals of generations of French and English readers” (p. 111). The writer
concludes: “when beheading custom haunts French and English romances, nobody
laughs. Readers are expected to sympathize with the French lovers and act with
the English ones” (p. 121).

Jacqueline Fromonot’s article in Part 2 is entitled ‘‘Paradoxes of
impoliteness in Vanity Fair’, by W.M. Thackeray’. In this contribution,
Fromonot shows that impoliteness can be analyzed through three related
sub-categories: polite impoliteness, impolite politeness and impolite
impoliteness. Polite impoliteness refers to polishing and policing impolite
signifiers into a polite final product. This strategy is used when the writer
intends to avoid hurting the recipients. Impolite politeness in Thackeray’s
work is used when the effort to turn impoliteness into politeness fails, and
it produces impoliteness. Impolite impoliteness happens when the indictment in
Thackeray’s work first targets the characters and then the readers.

Part 3 of Chapter 3 is by Vanina Jobert-Martini: ‘Impoliteness and rebellion
in “Christmas” by McGahern’. The main aim in this article is to study how the
verbal strategies of character, narrator and author are combined in the short
story of ‘Christmas’ and how they produce a specific effect in the reader. She
shows how the verbal interactions of direct speech, reported speech and
narrative report of speech acts help build a very specific text world ruled by
rigid social codes while simultaneously featuring a dynamic process of
rebellion, which receives an unmitigated positive evaluation from the
narrator. The author concludes that there is a kind of continuum between
direct speech, reported speech, narrative report of speech acts and “action
statements” (i.e. actions which function as speech) in ‘Christmas’.

The last part of this chapter is: ‘“Who are they to talk to us like that?”
Narrative impoliteness and the reader’. In this article, Claire Majola-Leblond
discusses the write-reader relationship in a literary context and argues that
the reader’s reaction to impoliteness is not primarily aimed at the author,
but rather self-centred and self-oriented. Authors of literary texts have
various impoliteness strategies (authorial policies) at their disposal, the
aim of which are not causing ‘offence’, but rather “to force us out of our
pre-established modes of understanding, to confront us to radical otherness,
to broaden our outlook on the word, whet our understanding, to make us capable
of holding conflicting viewpoints, of adopting antagonistic perspectives, and
hopefully potentially capable of solving problems and appeasing conflicts” (p.
151). She focuses on the story of “Everything in this country must” and
suggests that literary interaction is face-flattering, or rather,
face-enhancing.

The fourth chapter, ‘Impoliteness in Philosophy of Language’, consists of two
parts. In the first part, ‘Systematized impoliteness in the nonsense world of
‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’, Celia
Schneebeli analyses the systematized impoliteness of the characters in Alice
in Wonderland using the six maxims of Lecercle’s (1994) Impoliteness
Principle, which are the mirror image of Leech’s Politeness Principle (1983).

In the second paper of this chapter, ‘Impoliteness, agôn, dissensus in “The
two philosophers”: Irvine Welsh and a political philosophy of language’,
Simone Rinzler discusses the short story of ‘The two philosophers’ based on
Lecercle’s (1994) proposed set of Principles of Struggle. She maintains that
the story deals with several social issues which do not involve linguistic
impoliteness, but rather social and political impoliteness according to micro
and macro contexts.

The concluding chapter in this volume ‘Impoliteness and Modern Communication’,
provides three case studies of impoliteness in oral and virtual communication.
The first one is by Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell and is entitled ‘You know:
(Im)politeness marker in naturally occurring speech?’. The writer investigates
the function of ‘you know’ and argues that its use in interactions is not a
politeness marker. Due to its falling intonation, the contextual prominence of
‘I’, the upper hand of the speaker seeking no genuine interaction and its
common collocation with tags, Gaudy-Campbell considers it as a tool for the
speaker to impose his point of view on the co-speaker.

The second case study in this chapter is by Laura-Gabrielle Goudet and is
entitled ‘Alternative spelling and censorship: The treatment of profanities in
virtual communities’. In this article, the writer first studies the parameters
of censorship online. In the second part of her study, she discusses the
typology of uses and abuses on the Internet, focusing on alternative
spellings, spelling mistakes and words bearing ambiguous meanings codified
through sets of alternative spellings. The topic of the last part of her study
is the use of community-centred profanities and insults. She concludes that
computer-based censorship cannot be the ideal strategy to avoid profanities
and insults on the Internet because of its complex nature and because only
human intervention could circumvent such divergences from the Terms of
Service.

In the final paper in this publication ‘Fanning the flames? A study of insult
forms on the Internet’, Bertrand Richet investigates why and how an insult
forum is created, how it evolves and what it implies. He provides some
theoretical-contextual background by looking at the three elements of insults
in argument, insults as fun and computer-mediated communication (CMC) versus
face-to-face (FTF) conversation. Then, he focuses more specifically on the
functioning and content of forums, which lead to the creation of specialized
insult threads or separate forums. In the last part, he examines the
constraints surrounding the creation and operation of insult forums. Richet
concludes that the idea of an insult forum is counterproductive since it
imposes  a lack of freedom.

EVALUATION

Unlike linguistic politeness, which has been an established area of research
since the publication of “Politeness -- Some universals in language use”
(1978), research on impoliteness is a relatively new research paradigm.
‘Aspects of Linguistic Impoliteness’ does an excellent job of filling an
existing gap and bringing together a collection of scholarly approaches to
this phenomenon.
 
The book starts with an introduction to impoliteness by Culpeper, a leading
expert in this area. It then introduces different aspects where impoliteness
can be approached. The second chapter which focuses on impoliteness in
television series and drama is particularly interesting where the contributors
look at how impoliteness used appropriately creates humour. The contributors
provide plenty of examples by means of which they illustrate the role of the
context, addresser, addressee and audience in creating humorous language.

All in all, this is a thought-provoking and insightful volume that will
hopefully encourage future attempts to research the subject of linguistic
impoliteness. The book attempts to present ‘impoliteness’ as a common research
paradigm for linguists, discourse analysts and literary critics and provides
studies on the subject in the different contexts of spoken and written
language. It will be of interest to graduate students and readers who are
interested in an introduction to the topic of impoliteness as well as a guide
to current work on this phenomenon.

Although research on impoliteness is a relatively new research area, no single
book can cover all its relevant aspects. The current book discusses some of
its most important aspects and contexts. However, the discussion could have
been further extended to intercultural instances of impoliteness. Perhaps more
studies on everyday use of language could have been included, in which
cultural misunderstandings lead to impolite reactions. Crucially, however, the
book under review provides the reader with useful methodological tools to
undertake these kinds of future investigations.

REFERENCES

Brown, P. & Levinson, S. 1978. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Brown, P. & Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language usage,
Cambridge: CUP.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. 1994. Philosophy of nonsense, London: Routledge.

Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of pragmatics, London: Longman.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Leila Khabbazi-Oskouei finished her PhD in language and linguistics at the
University of East Anglia/UK in Dec. 2011. The title of her thesis is
'Interactional Variation in English and Persian: A Comparative Analysis of
Metadsicourse Features in Magazine Editorials'. It focuses on comparing and
contrasting the use of interactional devices in English and Persian, and
discussing the similarities and differences in the light of the cultural
expectations and political settings in some British and Iranian news magazine
editorials. Her first thesis-driven paper ‘Propositional or Non-propositional,
That is the Question: A New Approach to Analyzing Interpersonal Metadiscourse
in Editorials’ was published in the Journal of Pragmatics in 2013. She is
interested in the following subject areas: intercultural communication, the
expression of interactional metadiscourse in the media, particularly the
press, patterns of cross-cultural variation in British and Iranian discourse.








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