37.683, Reviews: The Grammar of Impoliteness: Daniel Van Olmen, Marta Andersson, Jonathan Culpeper, and Riccardo Giomi (eds.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.683, Reviews: The Grammar of Impoliteness: Daniel Van Olmen, Marta Andersson, Jonathan Culpeper, and Riccardo Giomi (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 18-Feb-2026
From: Gabriella Ragozzino [gabriella.ragozzino at edu.unige.it]
Subject: Morphology, Pragmatics, Syntax: Daniel Van Olmen, Marta Andersson, Jonathan Culpeper, and Riccardo Giomi (eds.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-3634

Title: The Grammar of Impoliteness
Series Title: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]
volume # 392
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: De Gruyter Brill
           https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en
Book URL:
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111477084/html

Editor(s): Daniel Van Olmen, Marta Andersson, Jonathan Culpeper, and
Riccardo Giomi

Reviewer: Gabriella Ragozzino

SUMMARY
The volume The Grammar of Impoliteness, edited by Daniel Van Olmen,
Marta Andersson, Jonathan Culpeper and Riccardo Giomi, explores the
grammatical dimension of linguistic impoliteness. The central
hypothesis that unites the contributions is that impoliteness is not
an exclusively socio-pragmatic and contextual phenomenon, but can be
encoded in specific linguistic forms and constructions. To examine
this thesis, the volume brings together contributions that adopt
diverse theoretical, methodological and typological approaches.
The book's structure includes an introductory chapter, a central
section composed of nine case studies and a concluding chapter
dedicated to the implications and future directions for research.
It is aimed at an academic audience interested in the interface
between grammar and pragmatics, with a specific focus on the
conventionalization of linguistic impoliteness.
In the introductory Chapter 1, “The grammar of impoliteness", the
editors lay the theoretical groundwork for the collection. The chapter
argues for the necessity of studying impoliteness not only as a
contextual phenomenon, but also as an aspect encoded in grammar. It
provides key definitions of 'impoliteness' and 'grammar' and
introduces the methodological and typological questions explored in
the subsequent essays.
In Chapter 2, "Impolite suffixoids in English slang", Elisa Mattiello
examines how English slang elements like -ass and -head act as
suffixoids specialized for impoliteness. Using data from the Corpus of
Contemporary American English, she demonstrates their productivity and
offensive functions. A comparison with Italian further illustrates how
different languages employ distinct grammatical strategies to form
impolite expressions.
In Chapter 3, “A theoretical and experimental investigation of the
morpho-syntax of an anti-honorific prefix in Korean,” Colin Davis and
Hyewon Jang examine the Korean prefix che-, described as an
“anti-honorific” marker associated with non-honorific reference to the
verb’s subject. The chapter reports an experimental study on its
ordering relative to other verbal prefixes and situates the analysis
within a generative framework, focusing on the morpho-syntactic
properties of che-.
In Chapter 4, "Blessings and curses are structurally different: Data
from Daghestan," Nina Dobrushina compares the grammar of curses and
blessings in three Nakh-Daghestanian languages. Her analysis
identifies several distinctive structural tendencies in curses. The
chapter discusses that these preferences, while not absolute, relate
to the grammatical encoding of impoliteness.
Chapter 5, "Che ti venga NP, a conventionalised impoliteness formula
for Italian disease curses (14th–20th century)" by Annick Paternoster,
examines the history of the Italian curse formula. The analysis of
historical corpora provides evidence for the formula's grammatical
stability over centuries and its status as a conventionalized impolite
expression for wishing diseases upon others.
In Chapter 6, “Wehe ‘woe’ + verb-second conditional clause in German:
A conventionalized threat construction?”, Rita Finkbinder investigates
the role of the German interjection wehe (‘woe’) in expressing
threats. After establishing the ambiguity of the interjection itself,
the author conducts a corpus-based analysis focusing on a more
specific grammatical pattern. The analysis centres on the construction
wehe + a verb-second (V2) clause with a second-person subject in
relation with a threat reading.
In Chapter 7, "‘What the hell?!’ vs. ‘Wat de hel?!’: Contrasting the
intensifying WHx construction in English and Afrikaans," G. B. van
Huyssteen, A. Breed and S. Pilon conduct a contrastive corpus analysis
of the intensifying WHx construction. The chapter compares the
Afrikaans construction to its English counterpart to investigate
whether it has evolved beyond its origin as a calque. The analysis
highlights several key differences in Afrikaans. The authors also note
an additional function of humor, suggesting that these features point
to the development of an autonomous construction in Afrikaans.
In Chapter 8, "Such an impoliteness: Evidence for the ‘evaluative such
construction’," Angela Queisser and Monika Pleyer present a series of
experimental studies on the ‘such a...’ construction in English and
German. Through four questionnaire studies, they investigate whether
the presence of such/so in a predicative statement induces a negative
evaluative reading.
In Chapter 9, "Conventionalized impoliteness in English and Polish:
The case of ‘you idiot!’," Daniel Van Olmen and Marta Andersson
examine the YOU + NP construction (e.g., you idiot!). The chapter
investigates two central questions through a questionnaire study in
English and Polish: first, whether the construction functions as a
conventionalized impolite formula, particularly through its coercion
effect on neutral nouns; and second, whether the explicit presence of
the pronoun "you" increases the perceived impoliteness of an address.
In Chapter 10, "A corpus-based exploration of British English
impoliteness formulae," Jonathan Culpeper, Isolde van Dorst and Mathew
Gillings conduct a corpus-based exploration examining the existence
and function of a set of British English impoliteness formulae. The
chapter describes the process in two phases: first, the construction
of complex search queries to explore the grammatical definability of
each formula and retrieve it from a corpus of spoken language; second,
the manual analysis of the retrieved contexts to measure the frequency
with which these formulae are actually used impolitely. The study
therefore focuses on both the formal structure of the formulae and
their pragmatic association with impoliteness.
The concluding chapter, "What’s in a word? Reflections about
impoliteness and future directions" by Marina Terkourafi, reflects on
whether impoliteness is a phenomenon of form or content. The author
introduces a distinction between "conventions of form" and
"conventions of content" to analyse this issue. Drawing on the
volume's contributions, Terkourafi proposes an agenda for future
research focusing on the diachrony, typology and semantics of
impoliteness. The essay concludes by emphasizing that impoliteness
remains a complex phenomenon at the interface between semantics and
pragmatics.
EVALUATION
The central aim of the volume The Grammar of Impoliteness is to argue
that impoliteness is not solely a contextual and interactional
phenomenon, but can also be encoded in grammatical structures and
constructions. In pursuing this goal, the collection is successful.
The nine case studies, framed by a robust theoretical introduction and
a forward-looking conclusion, collectively provide compelling evidence
for this claim by approaching impoliteness from a range of grammatical
perspectives. Across the chapters, impoliteness is consistently
treated as a phenomenon that can become conventionalized in recurrent
linguistic forms, rather than being entirely dependent on situational
inference. In this respect, the volume offers a coherent and
significant contribution to ongoing debates on the grammar–pragmatics
interface, providing strong empirical support for the claim that
certain linguistic forms can become conventionalized and carry default
impolite readings (cf. Culpeper 2011; Terkourafi 2005).
One of the volume's primary strengths is its argumentative coherence.
Despite bringing together a variety of contributions, the book reads
as a unified whole. This is achieved through its framing chapters: the
editors' introduction sets a clear theoretical agenda, while Marina
Terkourafi's concluding reflections weave the individual findings
together. This strong editorial structure ensures that each chapter
clearly contributes to the book's central thesis, creating a powerful
and sustained scholarly conversation.
This coherence is further reinforced by the book's impressive
methodological and typological diversity. The central claim is tested
using a wide array of tools, lending considerable weight to the
overall findings. The volume showcases the power of corpus linguistics
for tracking conventionalized formulae (as in the chapters by Culpeper
et al., and Paternoster), the precision of experimental methods for
isolating grammatical effects (Queisser & Pleyer; Van Olmen &
Andersson) and the rigor of formal syntactic analysis (Davis & Jang).
Furthermore, the typological dimension of the volume represents a
clear strength. The inclusion of studies on languages beyond English,
such as Korean and languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian family,
alongside several European languages introduces a valuable
cross-linguistic perspective. While the range of languages remains
necessarily selective, this comparative approach begins to probe the
extent to which claims about a “grammar of impoliteness” may
generalize beyond a single language family.
While the volume's strengths are significant, its ambitious scope
naturally leaves some questions open for future investigation. These
points should be seen less as shortcomings and more as avenues for
research that the collection itself helpfully brings into focus.
First, as noted above, the volume’s typological coverage, while a
valuable step forward, remains predominantly focused on European
languages. This necessarily limits the generalizability of some of the
observed patterns.
Second, a methodological feature shared by many of the contributions
is their reliance on written data, including text corpora and
questionnaire-based methods. While this approach is well suited to the
analysis of grammatical and lexical patterns, it leaves aside the role
of prosody and other multimodal cues in the production and
interpretation of impoliteness. As a result, questions concerning how
intonation interacts with grammatical constructions remain largely
unexplored.
Finally, at a theoretical level, the volume shows that a range of
linguistic frameworks can be brought to bear on the analysis of
grammaticalized impoliteness. At the same time, these approaches often
operate in parallel, with limited explicit engagement with one
another. The collection might therefore have benefited from a more
sustained dialogue between frameworks. While the volume makes clear
that multiple theoretical paths can lead to similar analytical
insights, a deeper synthesis across frameworks remains an open and
promising direction for future research.
In conclusion, The Grammar of Impoliteness is a stimulating and
carefully curated volume that brings renewed attention to the role of
grammatical form in the study of impoliteness. The collection will be
of clear interest to scholars working on (im)politeness and
pragmatics, as well as to linguists concerned with the interface
between grammar and meaning. Sociolinguists may find valuable points
of contact for exploring how social evaluation becomes
conventionalized in linguistic structure, while morphologists and
syntacticians will encounter challenging data that test the limits of
existing theoretical models.
Ultimately, the volume’s most significant contribution lies in showing
that the boundary between grammar and pragmatics is more permeable
than is often assumed. As Marina Terkourafi notes in the concluding
chapter, the questions raised throughout the collection point to
several lines of inquiry that remain open. While the volume does not
aim to provide definitive answers to all these issues, it succeeds in
outlining a clear and productive research agenda for future work on
the relationship between linguistic form and social interaction.
REFERENCES
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence
(Vol. 28). Cambridge University Press.
Terkourafi, M. (2015). Conventionalization: A new agenda for
im/politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 11-18.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Gabriella Ragozzino is a PhD student in Psychology and Cognitive
Sciences at the University of Genoa. Her research is situated within
experimental pragmatics and focuses on the perception and cognitive
processing of (im)politeness and indirect speech acts. She employs
experimental and quantitative methods alongside theoretical approaches
to pragmatics. Her broader research interests include language
attitudes and dialect perception.



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