(Im)politeness research has often focused on either the importance of social norms or on the intentions of the speaker, overlooking the active role played by the recipient(s) in assigning social meaning. This limitation pertains particularly to so-called “discernment languages” such as Korean and Japanese. This work addresses this gap by focusing on recipient agency in interpretations/evaluations of impoliteness. Two sets of data are drawn from the naturally occurring computer-mediated communications that appeared in two popular internet portal sites in South Korea. Both sets of data contain metapragmatic discussions of impoliteness that involve recipient evaluation of a speaker’s actions and language use as offensive or not. I focus on how the recipients in the data agentively evaluate the language used by speakers, including inconsistent evaluations of non-honorific language, or panmal. The results show that variability in the interpretation of (im)politeness cannot be explained solely by social norms or intentions, and must also include the socially-mediated agency of the recipient(s). / 2021-04-30

abstract: The ways in which human relationships are managed via language is a topic of particular interest in the area of sociolinguistics where work into the study of such topics as politeness, impoliteness, and rapport management have attempted to shed light on this phenomenon. This study examines two segments of extended discourse by President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia at the 2008 Summit of the Rio Group where he addressed a gathering of Rio Group members comprising heads of state from Latin American and Caribbean nations. Faced with serious accusations about his nation's military actions into Ecuador a few days before the meeting in question, Uribe engaged the group through two extended statements where he defended his government's actions. In these two segments of discourse Uribe changed his tone; it is this change that the present study attempts to describe in terms of modification to the effects of his discourse on the relationship between himself and the other interlocutors. To this end, an analysis is done classifying Uribe's utterances as polite, per Brown and Levinson's politeness model, and impolite, per Culpeper's impoliteness model. Additionally, Spencer Oatey's model of rapport management is used to classify Uribe's utterances according to their effect on the components of rapport. These classifications are examined alongside an analysis of factors related to rapport management such as frame, purpose of the exchange, and participants, for the purpose of understanding how these many factors work together to generate a changed effect to rapport. Of greatest significance in this study is the relationship between (im)politeness strategies and components of rapport. This dynamic provided an interesting way of examining (im)politeness in a new context, one that factored-in the effects of (im)politeness to the relationship between interlocutors. The study, as described above, showed that Uribe's change in tone was indeed a change to approach to rapport management characterized by an initial focus on the transactional and relational goals rapport component in the first of two segments, that then changed in the second part to a focus on face and association rights. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2011

This essay investigates impoliteness in the context of Twitter-based comments on award announcing tweets for the Most Valuable Player-award (MVP) in the National Basketball League (NBA) and the Women´s National Basketball League (WNBA). A comparison was made between how impoliteness is realized in the male NBA and the female WNBA,allowing for a comparison of received impoliteness based on gender. The essay spans the period of five years of MVP-winners for each league for a total of five Twitter posts per league. The data were analysed using a discourse analytical framework and werecategorised using Jonathan Culpeper´s (2005) impoliteness strategies. The essay offers an insight into how often and what type of impoliteness athletes receive on social media. As the study concludes, the results were compared and contrasted with the findings of other impoliteness studies, as well as how the landscape of sports media contributes to the presence of impoliteness on social media.

This study aims to focus on extracting and analyzing impoliteness in corpora in British English and Turkish retrieved from two different corpora British National Corpus (BNC) and Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC), which is under construction. It focuses on conversation as genre in spoken interaction and discusses issues related to impoliteness in a corpus driven linguistics (CDL) approach. It proposes two levels / extraction and analysis. Within the CDL framework, the theory or model of impoliteness behind the analysis will be forced by the findings gathered from the extraction of impoliteness. At the extraction level, among the spoken texts in both in BNC and the databases of STC, for the purposes of this study, dialogues that include a conflict or an offending event will be selected. In order to select such dialogues, various methods will be applied. First, spoken texts will be scanned through an initial word query, collocation query, question sentences and tags query, query for imperatives and possible queries that allow for searching for prosodic nuances, as well as interruptions and overlaps to the extent the corpora and the focus of the study allow. Second, metapragmatics comments, conventionalized impoliteness formulae, cues for non-conventionalized implicational impoliteness,conversational patterns, and other cues such as semantic prosody coming into play in the co-text and context are taken into consideration. Once the selection is completed, the insights gathered from the extracted instances of impoliteness will be applied to analyze the data. Impoliteness in both languages will be examined in regards to how impoliteness is triggered, how the progression of impolite exchanges takes place, and how those instances of impoliteness are resolved. Other considerations such as context-determined impoliteness, intentionality of the speaker, and perception of the hearer will be discussed.

<p>  </p> <p>This study addresses a critical gap in the existing literature by investigating the manifestation of impoliteness through the use of emojis within the online Vietnamese community on social media. The research is guided by three central questions: (1) How do Vietnamese Facebook users use emojis in their posts and comments? (2) How do Vietnamese Facebook users perceive impolite behaviors in cyberspace? and (3). What strategies do Vietnamese speakers employ to express impoliteness with emojis on social media? Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on a corpus of posts and comments on a Facebook showbiz confession page. Results show that facial emojis, particularly those forming homogeneous sequences, are preferred, with laughter-related emojis prominently featured. Additionally, emotive particles, together with expletives, frequently co-occur with emojis, compensating for absent extralinguistic cues in computer-mediated communication. By administering checks using dictionaries, mutual information scores, collocation visualizations, and cosine similarity, a nuanced understanding of impoliteness in CMC was achieved. Religious influences, particularly from Buddhism, were found to play a significant role in shaping Vietnamese impoliteness perception, exemplified by terms such as <em>vô duyên</em> and <em>sân si</em>. A coding scheme informed by findings from the second research question on a sample of 100 first posts and comments in the main corpus was used. The study further substantiates the hypothesis that Vietnamese speakers predominantly employ implicational impoliteness strategies, particularly through multimodal mismatches facilitated by emojis. Conventionalized formulas featuring emojis were infrequent, suggesting a preference for more dynamic and context-specific impoliteness expressions. This research contributes to the refinement of impoliteness theoretical and methodological approaches, as well as providing a foundation for further studies in online discourse and natural language processing. </p>

The present study investigates the use of impoliteness in American presidential debates, analyzing whether the use of impoliteness strategies has increased, whether this varies depending on the candidate’s status as an incumbent or a challenger and if Donald Trump is an outlier when compared to his peers. To conduct this study, a total of 12 debates from the last 6 elections (2000-2020) were analyzed. The analysis used Culpeper’s (1996) framework as its base, specifically looking at the frequency and variability in the usage of face-attacks along with a set of output/micro-strategies from Garcia-Pastor (2008) typically used in the primary presidential debates as well as instances of overlaps and interruptions. The results showed, based on nearly all of the measured variables, that there was a significant increase in the 2016 and the subsequent 2020 debates when compared to the preceding ones. Furthermore, there were clear differences found in the incumbent presidents’ strategy choice and frequency when compared to their opponents as the former would typically be more defensive, using less impoliteness. Trump strayed from this established pattern by being vastly more aggressive than his incumbent predecessors. He additionally scored the highest in nearly all of the measured variables, this, in conjunction with the noticeable difference in his use of overlapping speech, as well as direct face-attacks, leads to the conclusion that he is an outlier in his use of impoliteness and a likely catalyst for the increase seen in the 2016-2020 debates.

Esta pesquisa se fundamenta, principalmente, na pragmática sociocultural. Nessa perspectiva, a interpretação da cortesia e da descortesia deve ser realizada a partir de relações entre o linguístico e o sociocultural. Em consonância com essa perspectiva, esta tese objetiva verificar, de modo contrastivo, em corpus do espanhol argentino e do português brasileiro, como está formulado linguisticamente o ato de fala da crítica, quais as possibilidades de respostas a esse ato e quais os efeitos de (des)cortesia presentes nos intercâmbios analisados. Por fim, visa comparar, de modo breve, algumas análises com as percepções dos juízes (informantes) obtidas a partir do método de consulta (BRAVO, 2009). Nosso corpus argentino é formado por 15 cenas do filme FRANCIA (2009) e nosso corpus brasileiro é formado por 14 cenas do filme LINHA DE PASSE (2008). Nesses corpora, selecionamos o ato de fala da crítica em cenas ocorridas em dois âmbitos: o privado e o público. Nossa proposta metodológica é composta, basicamente, por quatro etapas. A primeira e a segunda consistem em analisar linguisticamente em cada corpus o ato de fala da crítica e suas reações a partir do cotexto e do contexto explicitados durante a análise, e a partir dessas trocas interpretar o efeito de (des)cortesia. A terceira etapa consiste em comparar nossa interpretação com a percepção de juízes (informantes) de cada língua, a partir de resultados do método de consulta. A última etapa consiste em tecer comparações entre o âmbito privado e público de cada idioma, para por fim, comentar diferenças e semelhanças entre os dois idiomas. Os resultados da comparação entre os âmbitos em cada idioma demonstram que não há diferenças significativas entre os âmbitos. Quanto aos tipos de críticas, percebemos que, mais do que a influência dos âmbitos, fatores como o grau de compromisso afetivo, a simetria ou assimetria na relação entre os interlocutores, o grau de problematicidade temática da interação, ou seja, da conflituosidade da interação e questões culturais são determinantes nas escolhas linguísticas dos falantes fictícios ao criticar. Acerca das reações, tanto no âmbito privado como no público, predominam as Defesas, dada a natureza ameaçadora do ato de fala da crítica. No que se refere à FRANCIA EA em comparação com LINHA DE PASSE PB, os resultados da análise linguística e sociocultural sinalizam que não há muitas diferenças no modo como argentinos e brasileiros formulam linguisticamente a crítica, mas há diferenças importantes no modo como ambas as nacionalidades reagem a esse ato de fala, diferenças essas, de modo geral, relacionadas às premissas culturais de cada comunidade de fala. / This research is mainly based upon sociocultural pragmatics. In this perspective, the interpretation of politeness and impoliteness has to be done from the relations between linguistic and socialcultural contexts. According to this view, this thesis aims at showing, in a contrastive way, in an Argentinian Spanish corpus and in a Brazilian Portuguese corpus, how speech acts about criticism are linguistically formulated, what the possible responses to these acts are and what (im)politeness effects are present in the analysed exchanges. At last, it focuses on briefly comparing some analyses with judges (informants) perceptions gotten by the consulting method (BRAVO, 2009). Our Argentinian corpus is composed by 15 scenes of the film FRANCIA (2009) and our Brazilian corpus consists of 14 scenes of the film LINHA DE PASSE. In these corpora we have selected speech acts about criticism in scenes that happened in two situations: privately and publicly. Our methodological proposal is basically composed by four phases. The first and the second ones consist of linguistically analysing in each corpus the speech acts about criticism and their reactions established in the co-text and set in the context during the analysis, and interpreting the effect of (im)politeness in these turn exchanges. The third phase consists of comparing our interpretation with judges (informants) perceptions in each language, considering the results from the consulting methods. The last phase consists of making comparisons between the private and the public contexts in each language in order to, at last, comment on differences and similarities between the two languages. The results in the comparison between the contexts in each language show that there are not significant differences in the contexts. As far as the types of criticism are concerned, we see that, more than the influence of the contexts, elements like the degree of affective commitment, the symmetry or asymmetry in the relation among speakers, the degree of theme problems in the interaction, that is, the conflicts in the interaction and the cultural issues are crucial in the linguistic choices the fictional speakers make when criticizing. About reactions, both in the private and in the public contexts, Defenses predominate, due to the threatening nature of the speech act of criticism. Particularly for FRANCIA EA (argentinian spanish) in comparison with LINHA DE PASSE PB (brasilian portuguese), the results of the linguistic and sociocultural analyses show that there are not many differences in the way Argentinians and Brazilians express criticism linguistically, but there are important differences in the way these peoples respond to this type of speech act, which, in general, are concerned with cultural premises specific to each speaking community.

O presente estudo tem como propósito analisar a gestão da imagem em um tipo de interação marcada pela polêmica, na qual ocorre o emprego agressivo do trabalho de face. Assim, analisar-se-ão as estratégias de ataque, defesa e valorização das faces em um tipo de interação específica no caso, o debate político em que predominam relações de descortesia entre falantes e ouvintes. Entendemos que a imagem cumpre um papel imprescindível no trabalho de persuasão empreendido pelos interactantes em interações cuja lógica é o conflito. Em razão disso, tomamos, como fundamentação teórica para a abordagem dos mecanismos discursivos, dos quais os interactantes fazem uso em trocas verbais regidas, em sua maioria, por atos de descortesia verbal, pressupostos de teorias que contemplem questões pertinentes para a análise do corpus, como a Análise da Conversação, a Pragmática sobretudo os estudos de Goffman e Brown e Levinson acerca da face bem como as contribuições da Teoria da Argumentação de Perelman e Olbrechts Tyteca, referentes à investigação das estratégias argumentativas de persuasão. Ademais, em virtude de analisarmos um tipo de interação cujo propósito é - mediante atos deliberados de descortesia isto é, atos intencionais - denegrir a imagem do outro e, em contrapartida, construir uma autoimagem, à qual o auditório atribua credibilidade, consideramos que a descortesia consiste em um tipo específico de estratégia, assumindo, assim, uma finalidade argumentativa: no caso, a de influenciar o auditório a atribuir juízos de valor negativos àquele cuja face é ameaçada por atos de descortesia, ou seja, por meio da desconstrução da imagem do outro na interação. Por essa razão, consideramos a necessidade de tomarmos, ainda, como embasamento teórico, as contribuições de estudiosos - sobretudo Aquino e Erlich - cujos trabalhos têm como objetivo analisar a polêmica nas interações verbais atrelada à questão da argumentação. O corpus, do qual fizemos uso, constitui-se da transcrição do primeiro debate do segundo turno, relativo às eleições de 1998, realizado em São Paulo, entre os candidatos ao governo: Mario Covas e Paulo Maluf. / The purpose of the present study is to analyse the management of image in an interaction determined by polemic, where occurs the offensive use of the face work. So, the strategies of attack, defence and valorization of faces will be analysed in a particular kind of interaction - the political debate - in which impoliteness relations between hearers and speakers predominate. Then, we think image takes an indispensable part at the persuasion work, carried out by the interlocutors, in interactions where the logic is the conflict. This way, we take as theorical basis, to the approach of the speech mechanisms used by interlocutors in verbal exchanges - most of which are ruled by impoliteness - assumptions of theories that rely on relevant issues for the corpus analysis, such as : Conversational Analysis the Pragmatic especially Goffmans, Browns, and Levinsons studies upon the face - as well as the contributions of Argumentation Theory by Perelman and Olbrechts Tyteca, referring to the investigation of the Persuasion Argumentative Strategies. Nevertheless, as we analyse the kind of interaction which purpose is, through deliberated and intentional impoliteness actions, to defame the others image and on the other hand, to build up a self image that might catch the audiences belief, we understand impoliteness is a particular strategy that assembles an argumentative purpose: influence the audience to attribute negative judgements to the one whose face is threatened by impoliteness actions, as to unmake the others image in the interaction. Thats why its necessary to take into account the theorical basis of the experts contributions especially Aquino and Erlich whose works analyse polemic at verbal interactions in addition to argumentation. The corpus weve used refers to the transcription of the first debate at the second poll in 1998 elections, which took place in São Paulo, between the government candidates : Mário Covas and Paulo Maluf.

Esta pesquisa se fundamenta, principalmente, na pragmática sociocultural. Nessa perspectiva, a interpretação da cortesia e da descortesia deve ser realizada a partir de relações entre o linguístico e o sociocultural. Em consonância com essa perspectiva, esta tese objetiva verificar, de modo contrastivo, em corpus do espanhol argentino e do português brasileiro, como está formulado linguisticamente o ato de fala da crítica, quais as possibilidades de respostas a esse ato e quais os efeitos de (des)cortesia presentes nos intercâmbios analisados. Por fim, visa comparar, de modo breve, algumas análises com as percepções dos juízes (informantes) obtidas a partir do método de consulta (BRAVO, 2009). Nosso corpus argentino é formado por 15 cenas do filme FRANCIA (2009) e nosso corpus brasileiro é formado por 14 cenas do filme LINHA DE PASSE (2008). Nesses corpora, selecionamos o ato de fala da crítica em cenas ocorridas em dois âmbitos: o privado e o público. Nossa proposta metodológica é composta, basicamente, por quatro etapas. A primeira e a segunda consistem em analisar linguisticamente em cada corpus o ato de fala da crítica e suas reações a partir do cotexto e do contexto explicitados durante a análise, e a partir dessas trocas interpretar o efeito de (des)cortesia. A terceira etapa consiste em comparar nossa interpretação com a percepção de juízes (informantes) de cada língua, a partir de resultados do método de consulta. A última etapa consiste em tecer comparações entre o âmbito privado e público de cada idioma, para por fim, comentar diferenças e semelhanças entre os dois idiomas. Os resultados da comparação entre os âmbitos em cada idioma demonstram que não há diferenças significativas entre os âmbitos. Quanto aos tipos de críticas, percebemos que, mais do que a influência dos âmbitos, fatores como o grau de compromisso afetivo, a simetria ou assimetria na relação entre os interlocutores, o grau de problematicidade temática da interação, ou seja, da conflituosidade da interação e questões culturais são determinantes nas escolhas linguísticas dos falantes fictícios ao criticar. Acerca das reações, tanto no âmbito privado como no público, predominam as Defesas, dada a natureza ameaçadora do ato de fala da crítica. No que se refere à FRANCIA EA em comparação com LINHA DE PASSE PB, os resultados da análise linguística e sociocultural sinalizam que não há muitas diferenças no modo como argentinos e brasileiros formulam linguisticamente a crítica, mas há diferenças importantes no modo como ambas as nacionalidades reagem a esse ato de fala, diferenças essas, de modo geral, relacionadas às premissas culturais de cada comunidade de fala. / This research is mainly based upon sociocultural pragmatics. In this perspective, the interpretation of politeness and impoliteness has to be done from the relations between linguistic and socialcultural contexts. According to this view, this thesis aims at showing, in a contrastive way, in an Argentinian Spanish corpus and in a Brazilian Portuguese corpus, how speech acts about criticism are linguistically formulated, what the possible responses to these acts are and what (im)politeness effects are present in the analysed exchanges. At last, it focuses on briefly comparing some analyses with judges (informants) perceptions gotten by the consulting method (BRAVO, 2009). Our Argentinian corpus is composed by 15 scenes of the film FRANCIA (2009) and our Brazilian corpus consists of 14 scenes of the film LINHA DE PASSE. In these corpora we have selected speech acts about criticism in scenes that happened in two situations: privately and publicly. Our methodological proposal is basically composed by four phases. The first and the second ones consist of linguistically analysing in each corpus the speech acts about criticism and their reactions established in the co-text and set in the context during the analysis, and interpreting the effect of (im)politeness in these turn exchanges. The third phase consists of comparing our interpretation with judges (informants) perceptions in each language, considering the results from the consulting methods. The last phase consists of making comparisons between the private and the public contexts in each language in order to, at last, comment on differences and similarities between the two languages. The results in the comparison between the contexts in each language show that there are not significant differences in the contexts. As far as the types of criticism are concerned, we see that, more than the influence of the contexts, elements like the degree of affective commitment, the symmetry or asymmetry in the relation among speakers, the degree of theme problems in the interaction, that is, the conflicts in the interaction and the cultural issues are crucial in the linguistic choices the fictional speakers make when criticizing. About reactions, both in the private and in the public contexts, Defenses predominate, due to the threatening nature of the speech act of criticism. Particularly for FRANCIA EA (argentinian spanish) in comparison with LINHA DE PASSE PB (brasilian portuguese), the results of the linguistic and sociocultural analyses show that there are not many differences in the way Argentinians and Brazilians express criticism linguistically, but there are important differences in the way these peoples respond to this type of speech act, which, in general, are concerned with cultural premises specific to each speaking community.

<p>The aim of this study is to investigate how language is used, online, in a condescending way in order to make the recipient feel belittled. The research questions sought to find out what kind of linguistic strategies are used online in order to make language function in a derogatory way as well as the linguistic reactions these strategies evoke in the recipients. How this derogatory usage can be met by using specific linguistic strategies was also explored.</p><p>The study was conducted by performing qualitative discourse analysis based on the theoretical framework of Culpeper’s (1996) impoliteness theory. The data consisted of excerpts from four different threads in online discussion forums. The results indicate that there are several ways to insult someone, and that sarcasm, in particular, is heavily utilized in order to make language function in a derogatory manner.</p><p>The conclusion of the study is that phenomena such as the flouting of maxims, face-threatening acts, impoliteness strategies and flaming are all utilized when trying to belittle someone. All these linguistic strategies performed with the intention to insult people have proved to have a negative affect on people who are exposed to them. This affect can be detected through the linguistic reactions they rendered, for example: counter-attacks with insults of their own and refuting the insults.</p><p>The present study contributes to enlightening linguistic strategies which are being used in a derogatory way and as such might function to raise awareness of the power invested in language.</p>