Towards An
Anatomy of Impoliteness
Nur Arif S.
English Department Of STKIP PGRI Jombang
Received August 2012; revised version January 2013
Abstract
Politeness theories have focused on how communicative strategies
are employed to pro- mote or maintain social harmony in interaction. On the
other hand, little work has been done on communicative strategies with the
opposite orientation, that of attacking one's interlocutor and causing
disharmony. In this paper, I consider the notions of inherent and mock
impolite- ness, and discuss contextual factors associated with impoliteness. In
particular, I attempt to build an impoliteness framework which is parallel but
opposite to Brown and Levinson's (1987) theory of politeness. Finally, I
demonstrate that in some contexts - specifically that of army training and
literary drama - impoliteness behaviour is not a marginal activity, and that we
need an appropriate descriptive frlmaework in order to account for it.
1. Introduction
Over the last twenty years politeness theories have concentrated on
how we employ communicative strategies to maintain or promote social harmony:
[The role of the Politeness Principle is] "to maintain the
social equilibrium and the friendly relations which enable us to assume that
our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first place." (Leech, 1983:
82)
"... politeness, like formal diplomatic protocol (for which it
must surely be the model), presupposes that potential for aggression as it
seeks to disarm it, and makes possible communication between potentially
aggressive parties." (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 1)
o An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Poetics and
Linguistics Association conference held at Sheffield Hallam University (April
1994). I would like to thank participants for their comments. In addition, I
especially thank my sister Helen Culpeper for furnishing me with the army camp
data. and Elena Semino and Mick Short for reading and commenting on drafts of
this paper. I am also indebted to the comments of two anonymous reviewers.
Needless to say, responsibility for the final version lies with me.
"Politeness can be defined as a means of minimizing
confrontation in discourse - both the possibility of confrontation occurring at
all, and the possibility that a confrontation will be perceived as
threatening." (Lakoff, 1989: 102)
In this paper I shall investigate impoliteness, the use of
strategies that are designed to have the opposite effect - that of social
disruption. These strategies are oriented towards attacking face, an
emotionally sensitive concept of the self (Goffman, 1967; Brown and Levinson,
1987). The idea that the scope of a politeness theory might be extended to
include antag- onistic or confrontational communication is not new. Craig et
al. (1986) and Tracy (1990) argue that an adequate account of the dynamics of
interpersonal communica- tion should consider hostile as well as cooperative
communication. In analysing American courtroom discourse, both Lakoff (1989)
and Penman (1990) extended their models of politeness to include features of
confrontational discourse. Lui (1986), investigating politeness in a Chinese
novel, discussed impoliteness as an extension of Brown and Levinson's theory of
politeness (1987). j However, none of these studies focus comprehensively on
impoliteness in an attempt to improve our understanding of its operation and
its theoretical basis. In this paper I shall start by considering inherent
impoliteness and mock impolite- ness; I will then move on to discuss the
contextual factors that are associated with impoliteness and to propose a list
of impoliteness strategies. I shall conclude my dis- cussion by focussing on
the discourse of an army training camp and the discourse of drama. Here, as I
will demonstrate, Leech's claim that conflictive communication tends to be
"rather marginal to human linguistic behaviour in normal
circumstances" (1983: 105) does not apply.
