Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence
Summary: Impoliteness plays a central role in many contexts (e.g. military recruit training, exploitative TV shows) and is often of great interpersonal significance (e.g. family breakdowns, suicides as a result of bullying). Its pervasive public presence is implicitly acknowledged in the many public signs, charters, laws and institutional documents that attempt to control it. It is central to Tony Blair's 'Respect agenda' and has been the topic of a number of recent popular books (e.g. Lynne Truss's Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life). Yet there is no systematic or comprehensive treatment of impolite language use. When does language count as 'impolite'? What specific kinds of language generate impoliteness? How do people react to impoliteness? What makes language in a particular context seem more or less impolite? Basic questions such as these have not been addressed. This project aims to fill the gap. Whilst primarily located in pragmatics, a field of linguistics that focuses on language usage in context, it starts from the point of view that linguistic impoliteness must involve a multidisciplinary approach, and draws in particular from social psychology. It deploys a range of methodologies, though mostly the qualitative analysis of large language datasets.
Key Facts
Principal Investigator: Jonathan Culpeper
Dept/Research Group: Linguistics and English Language
Project Description
Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence