A Research On Verbal Impoliteness Under The Perspective Of Rapport Management Theory

After the proposal of politeness theory by Brown and Levinson in 1978,plenty of researches on politeness in conversations have been done.However,people were not always polite while talking.Jonathan Culpeper first put forward impoliteness theory in 1996,and has been doing a series of systematic studies on impoliteness.Culpeper stated that in impoliteness researches,the concept of “face” should not be abandoned and therefore he adopted rapport management theory that was put forward by Spencer-Oatey in 2000.This thesis,based on impoliteness theory and rapport management theory,using quantitative and qualitative method,is a research on verbal impoliteness by sportsmen during their postgame interviews.The main purpose is to find out what impolite strategies are used,why the sportsmen would be impolite during public interviews and who are the sportsmen impolite to.This thesis collects 67 interviews by sportsmen that are considered as verbal impoliteness.With the help of researching tools ELAN and Praat,the collected data are able to be transcribed and the prosodic features can be analyzed.After the data collection,113 instances of using impoliteness strategies and 92 instances of face damaging are illustrated.Among the impolite strategies presented by Culpeper,the sportsmen use bald on record impoliteness,positive impoliteness,negative impoliteness,and the strategy of sarcasm or mock politeness.In positive impoliteness,the most frequently used output strategy is “use taboo words”,and in negative impoliteness,the most frequently used output strategy is “condescend,scorn and ridicule”.Based on rapport management theory,during postgame interviews,the reason that the sportsmen are impolite is mostly because they feel that their quality face and equity rights are attacked by reporters and their opponents.By analyzing the postgame interviews by sportsmen,the thesis is a new completion in discourse to both impoliteness theory and rapport management theory.The usage of the researching tool Praat to analyze the prosodic features of impolite utterances can also be seen as a supplement for domestic impoliteness researching method.