Study On The Pragmatic Strategies And Recreational Functions Of Impoliteness

Since Brown & Levinson(1978/1987), Leech(1983) proposed the politeness theory, the researches on politeness phenomena have become one of the focuses of pragmatics and social linguistics. However, language, as a main means used by human beings to communicate, not only constitutes polite expressions, but also impolite ones. Politeness theories, to some extent, cannot explain the impoliteness phenomena under certain context, so we need a new model. In 1996, Culpeper proposed an impoliteness model which parallels to Brown & Levinson’s politeness theory. In 2008, Bousfield published a book entitled Impoliteness in interaction. Meanwhile, Bousfield and Locher co-edited a book entitled Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice. These two books fill the gap of no books in impoliteness study and make a great contribution to perfecting the politeness study and pragmatic theory. Thus, the year of 2008 has been dubbed by Sifianou as “The Year of Impoliteness” in 2010.On the basis of the impoliteness theory, this paper continues to explore the verbal impoliteness phenomena from a creative aspect which concludes:(1) to analyze and discuss the impoliteness phenomena, then add and perfect the impoliteness strategies under impoliteness strategies from Culpeper and Bousfield;(2) to analyze the positive functions of impoliteness-- its recreational functions and classify these functions into different types;(3) to find out the reasons why these impoliteness behaviors can bring recreational functions.The data used in this thesis is collected from American sitcom 2Broke Girls. The major findings of this thesis are as follows: First, most of the impoliteness strategies from Culpeper and Bousfield are realized in the data. Second, there are five strategies that are not covered in previous studies. Third, the five types of recreational functions put forward by Culpeper are marked in the data and they can be classified into a type of recreational function. Fourth, it finds that the times and frequency of the strategies and its functions are different, and more details will be presented in the context.