On Impolite Speech Acts In Modern Chinese

The study on linguistic politeness has become a noted school of linguistic research since the publication of the seminal work on politeness in1987/1978by Brown and Levinson. whose name has almost been recognized as synonymous with linguistic politeness both at home and abroad. Despite of the fact that impoliteness is ubiquitously present in human communication, it is assumed to be an unfortunate behavioral aberration and is the nasty scum on the margins. Consequently, the research of linguistic impoliteness has been long neglected. Recently, there has been an impolite turn in politeness research in pragmatics, impoliteness, the long neglected "poor cousin" of politeness has moved into the spotlight from behind the curtains.Impoliteness was once regarded as the violation of the "Politeness Principle", the contradiction of social norms and regulations, and even labeled as "the dark side of politeness". The study on impoliteness has been considered as unnecessary by some researchers, resulting in the imbalance arid inadequacy of linguistic impoliteness compared with the innumerable great achievements made in politeness researches. As non-marginal linguistic phenomena within certain discourse types, the notion of impolite illocution and of politeness within interactions is worthy of study, and investigation. Although the study of linguistic politeness in Chinese has attracted the attention of many researchers, there has been no monograph or doctorate dissertation investigating impoliteness in modern oral Chinese. There exist some problems in the few researches on Chinese impoliteness which deserve to be clarified and further investigated. What is verbal impoliteness in modern Chinese? What is the essence of linguistic impoliteness? What are the ways of responding to linguistic impoliteness in communication? In what linguistic ways are Chinese impolite speech acts represented? What are the factors that contribute to trigger, intensify, even cancel the impolite implicature of those Chinese impolite utterances? What are the factors that influence the evaluation and judgment of Chinese impolite utterances? Besides causing conflict and disharmony, what are the pragmatic functions of those impolite utterances? These questions are the main concerns of the present dissertation.This dissertation focuses on impoliteness in naturally-occurring modern Chinese oral utterances. The dissertation redefines linguistic impoliteness by means of breaking away from the manacles of existing models and the chains of "face theory", tentatively putting forward "Interest Principle" in pragmatic analysis after a thorough review of the prevailing principles and theories dealing with linguistic politeness and impoliteness. We advocate that meaning lies in the interactive negotiation between different parties of communication. This dissertation attempts to explore impoliteness in modern Chinese verbal utterances from socio-cognitive perspective by combing two prevailing paradigms, i.e. internalism and externalism.Impolite utterances are manifestations of the communicator’s pragmatic strategies and attitudes, which embody the participants’ cognition, position and viewpoints. The initiation of verbal impoliteness and response to it in interpersonal communication are dynamic both in discourse representation and choice making, which are realized through complicated linguistic structures. We find that impolite illocutionary forces are conducted through various linguistic means with different degrees of offence. Through the example analysis, we find that representation of verbal impoliteness can be divided into direct and indirect impoliteness together with withholding politeness. Meanwhile, linguistic impoliteness can be genuine impoliteness and mock impoliteness depending on different contexts and communicative purposes, the functions of which are to widen or narrow the emotional, psychological distance between the parties concerned. The parties involved in the transactions of impolite illocutionary meaning include not only the speaker and hearer present but also the third party present or absent, who is also supposed to be the possible target and source of the impolite utterance.The impolite utterance meaning lies in the interactive negotiation between the speaker and hearer. Following the post-modern or discursive turn, we move from utterance level to discourse level, in other words, what we investigate covers both the production and the interpretation or response to it. The most commonly used ways of responding to impolite utterances are silence, admittance, defense, and offense.The recent trends in contemporary pragmatics increasingly suggest a perspective view of pragmatics, namely, the view that pragmatics should be taken as presenting a functional perspective on every aspect of linguistic behavior. Linguistic politeness or impoliteness is undoubtedly pragmatic in nature which involves many complicated factors including cognitive, social and cultural factors and so forth.Interdisciplinary characteristics in pragmatic research have become increasingly prominent, prosodic and non-verbal cues are equally important in the construction and interpretation of impolite utterance meaning. We find that prosodic and non-verbal cues play a vital role in the construction and interpretation of impolite utterance meaning, prosodic and non-verbal cues are often used to intensify and even cancel the impolite utterance meaning. The politeness maker can be used to convey impolite illocutionary force, or vice versa, thus mock politeness and mock impoliteness in communication come into being. We safely come to the conclusion that impoliteness is, to a large extent, not inherent in linguistic expression, it is co-constructed by the linguistic representation together with the intervention of context, prosodic and non-verbal cues.From the perspective of the speaker, impolite utterances are possible ways of emotional relief and strategy, aiming to achieve specific goals. As far as the pragmatic effect is concerned, verbal impoliteness is the evaluation and judgment of participants involved in the communication. The subject of evaluation can be the speaker, the hearer, the third party present or absent. They evaluate the same impolite utterance differently and from different perspectives, such as etic and emic perspective or layman’s/observer’s or researcher’s perspective. We conducted a survey by using the impolite utterances in the survey to find the different evaluation of layman observer and researcher, one survey with context and another without. After a simple descriptive statistics, we find that context plays a very important role in the evaluation of polite utterances, especially in the evaluation of mock politeness and mock impoliteness. We haven’t found significant gender difference in the evaluation of impoliteness, neither have we found any significant difference between layman observer and researcher in the evaluation of impoliteness.As far as the pragmatic function of Chinese impolite utterance is concerned, besides the function of emotional relief, impolite utterances are found to be able to entertain the audience, to build up and consolidate solidarity between participants, and to coerce the hearer to achieve specific goals. Contrary to the accepted idea that impoliteness causes conflict and disharmony, it can sometimes be used to cause harmony between interlocutors. Therefore, impoliteness can no longer be viewed as the violation of politeness principle, the contradiction of social norm, the dark side of politeness, rather it should be regarded as a part of pragmatic competence, what we have to take into consideration is whether we should and how to teach student to use linguistic impoliteness properly.