A Pragmatic Study On Impoliteness In English Interaction

Politeness widely exists in human’s social life and it is a common phenomenon in humanculture. As a factor of keeping linguistic interaction running smoothly, linguistic politeness iscommon in our social life. Thus, polite speech act and its related theories have always beenthe focus of scholars. However, as the opposite of politeness, impoliteness is not noticed andresearches on it are much rarer, as a result, it leads to imbalance between politeness andimpoliteness from the prospective of pragmatics. In recent years, people increasingly realizethat impoliteness is not only just an edge but also can be seen everywhere in our daily life.Thus, we should realize the importance of impoliteness and pay more attention to it.According to Bousfield’s impoliteness theory, the author chooses an American sitcomModern Family as the corpus. The research procedures are in the following: To begin with,the author downloads the sitcom Modern Family video on website; then, the authortranscribes the corpus to text and arranges these data on the basis of Conversational AnalysisTheory; thirdly, the author analyzes the corpus and presents the realizations of impolitenessand different response strategies of impolite utterances from the listener. Finally, the authorfurther interprets the positive functions of impoliteness.Conclusions of the thesis are showing as follows by analyzing the data from ModernFamily. Firstly, the author analyzes the realizations of impoliteness and provides somespecific examples. Different realizations are showing in different contexts. Bousfieldclassifies impoliteness strategies into two kinds, i.e. on-record and off-record impoliteness. Specifically, off-record impoliteness strategies contain two patterns: sarcasm and withholdimpoliteness. The author concludes10kinds of realizations of impoliteness by analyzing thecorpus, including5kinds of on-record impoliteness, such as using critical or aggressive words,using taboo words, threatening, avoiding agreement and interrupting. For off-recordimpoliteness, the author concludes on other3kinds of impoliteness strategies from the corpusbased on Bousfield’s off-record impoliteness strategies. The three impoliteness strategies areusing rhetorical devices, shifting topic and imposing. The author illustrates the10kinds ofimpoliteness strategies in some tables. Then, the author analyzes some effective factors aboutimpolite utterance in communication, including the power, context, misunderstanding andone’s speech habits. All these factors are presented in the corpus in Modern Family. Inaddition, the author analyzes the listeners’ response on the basis of Bousfield’s responsestrategies. From the corpus in Modern Family, the author finds that the majority of listenersrespond impolite utterance and there are only87samples of the total choosing not to respond.Specifically, the listener would keep silent or turn around when facing impoliteness. The othersamples choose responding to impoliteness, in which46samples are accepting and122samples are counterattacking impoliteness. When countering to impoliteness, some peopletend to offensive strategies and others choose defensive strategies. It presents from the corpusthat data of the latter is twice larger than the former. Thus, some people tend to not respondingwhen face impoliteness to prevent conflicts in communication, and most people choose adefensive strategy. In the end, the author concludes the positive functions of impoliteness,such as its entertaining function, releasing function and performing characters.The author hopes that impoliteness strategies can be used better and lead to a bettercommunicative result on the basis of the above researches.