Impoliteness

Impoliteness

Culpeper (2001) provides a framework based on Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) notion of Rapport Management with which researchers can analyze impoliteness events in terms of face management as well as sociality rights. Rapport Management asserts that politeness and, later, impoliteness, are not based solely on the preservation an individual’s self-image (i.e., their positive or negative face [Brown & Levinson, 1987]), but rather their association to others and their roles in the community play roles as well. This framework comprises Quality face, Social Identity face, Relational face, Equity rights, and Association rights. Definitions of these concepts are provided below. Culpeper adds taboo words and topics as other possible indicators of impoliteness that do not fit into these five categories. 
He applies this framework to cross-cultural data from England, Germany, Turkey, Finland, and China in order to observe cultural differences in impoliteness events. He finds that Quality face attacks are the most prevalent in the majority of these cultures with the exception of the German and Chinese data. Overall, Quality face attacks and violations to Equity and Association rights were the most popular offense cross-culturally. However, Relation face attacks are considered more impolite in the German and Chinese data than in the other observed cultures. Interestingly, Social identity face attacks and taboo words were considered more impolite in the English data than in the other cultures.

Components of Rapport Management

• Quality face: “fundamental desire for people to evaluate us positively in terms of our personal qualities.” (Spencer-Oatey, 2002: 540) 

• Social identity face: “fundamental desire for people to acknowledge and uphold our social identities or roles, e.g. as group leader, valued customer, close friend.” (Spencer Oatey, 2002: 540) Group counterpart to Quality face 

• Relational face: “the relationship between the participants (e.g. distance – closeness, equality-inequality, perceptions of role rights and obligations), and the ways in which this relationship is managed or negotiated.” (Spencer-Oatey, 2007: 647) 

• Equity: “fundamental belief that they are entitled to personal consideration from others and to be treated fairly.” (Spencer-Oatey, 2005: 100) 

• Association: “fundamental belief that they are entitled to an association with others that is in keeping with the type of relationship that they have with them.” (Spencer-Oatey, 2005: 100) 

Defining Impoliteness

Culpeper provides the following operationalization and definition for impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011: 23):

“Impoliteness is a negative attitude towards specific behaviors occurring in specific contexts. It is sustained by expectations, desires, and/or beliefs about social organisation, including, in particular, how one person’s or a group’s identities are mediated by others in interaction. Situated behaviors are viewed negatively – considered ‘impolite’ – when they conflict with how one expects them to be, how one wants them to be and/or how one thinks they ought to be. Such behaviors 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 how offensive an impolite behavior is taken to be, including for example whether one understands a behavior to be strongly intentional or not.”

According to Culpeper (2011, p. 254), the degree of impoliteness can be operationalized by the following factors: 

Attitudinal factors 
• Which (and the extent to which) expectations, desires and/or beliefs infringed are cognitively active; 
• The emotional sensitivity of the expectations, desires and/or beliefs infringed; 

Linguistic-pragmatic factors 
• The degree of offence conventionally associated with any linguistic formula used; 
• The amount and kind of intensifying linguistic work undertaken (the choice of intense lexis, the addition of taboo words or intensifiers, prosodic reinforcement, etc.); 
• The amount of inferential work required to understand the behavios in context; 
• The way in which and the extent to which the behavior matches or mismatches: (1) the other parts of the multimodal behavior, or (2) the context;

Contextual and co-textual factors 
• The extent to which the behavior is positively or negatively valued in the relevant culture; 
• The extent to which face or sociality rights are exposed; 
• The extent to which power structures are abused; 
• The extent to which the behavior is legitimised; 
• Whether the behavior is in-group or out-group; 
• The (im)politeness threshold set, in particular, by the co-text; 
• The degree of intentionality ascribed to the actor(s); 
• The kind of person the communicator is understood to be’ and 
• The perspective of the person taking offence

A symptom of offence being taken is a negative emotional reaction in, particularly, any target of the behavior, whether the symptom is articulated verbally or non-verbally. An impoliteness attitude may be referred to (and also partly shaped) by particular impoliteness-related labels (e.g. impolite, rude, discourteous, ill-mannered, aggressive), which collectively constitute an impoliteness metalanguage embedded in impoliteness metadiscourse. Each label refers to a slightly different domain of impoliteness, domains which vary according to degree of symbolic violence and the in-group/out-group dimension.”

Other Definitions of Impoliteness

The following definitions have been proposed prior to Culpeper (2011) and vary greatly: 

“(1) The lowest common denominator [underlying definitions of impoliteness in Bousfield and Locher 2008] can be summarized like this: Impoliteness is behavior that is face-aggravating in a particular context. (Locher and Bousfield, 2008: 3) 
(2) [rude behavior] does not utilise politeness strategies whetre they would be expected, in such a way that the utterance can only almost plausibly be interpreted as intentionally and negatively confrontational. (Lakoff, 1989: 103) 
(3) … rudeness is defined as a face threatening act (FTA) – or a feature of an FTA such as intonation – which violates a socially sanctioned norm of interaction of the social context in which it occurs. (Beebe, 1995: 159) 
(4) … impoliteness, communicative strategies designed to attack face, and thereby cause social conflict and disharmony… (Culpeper et al, 2003: 1546) 
(5) Impoliteness comes about when: (1) the speaker communicates face-attack intentionally, or (2) the hearer perceives and/or constructs behavior as intentionally face-attacking, or a combination of (1) and (2). (Culpeper, 2005a: 38) 
(6) … marked rudeness or rudeness proper occurs when the expression used is not conventionalised relative to the context of occurrence; following recognition of the speaker’s face-threatening intention by the hearer, marked rudeness threatens the addressee’s face… impoliteness occurs when the expression used is not conventionalised relative to the context of occurrence; it threatens the addressee’s face… but no face-threatening intention is attributed to the speaker by the hearer. (Terkourafi, 2008: 70) 
(7) … impoliteness constitutes the communication of intentionally gratuitous and conflictive verbal face-threatening acts (FTAs) which are purposefully delivered: (1) unmitigated, in contexts where mitigation is required, and/or, (2) with deliberate aggression, that is, with the face threat exacerbated, ‘boosted’, or maximised in some way to heighten the face damage inflicted. (Bousfield, 2008: 72) 
(8) … verbal impoliteness [is[ linguistic behavior assessed by the hearer as threatening her or his face or social identity, and infringing the norms of appropriate behavior that prevail in particular contexts and among particular interlocutors, whether intentionally or not. (Holmes et al, 2008: 196) 
(9) Rudeness is a kind of prototypically non-cooperative or competitive communicative behavior which destabilises the personal relationships of the interacting individuals… creates or maintains an emotional atmosphere of mutual irreverence and antipathy, which primarily serves egocentric interests…. (Kienpointer, 1997: 259)” 
(Culpeper, 2011: 19-20)

For additional concepts on impoliteness, visit the ‘Impoliteness’ website:
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/impoliteness/index.htm