Summary of Culpeper’s Impoliteness Principles

 

Jonathan Culpeper (2011) in Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence explores how language can be used to harm, offend, and assert power, challenging traditional politeness theories.

Key Points on Politeness and Impoliteness:

1. Definition of Impoliteness:

   • Impoliteness is a negative attitude toward specific behaviors occurring in specific contexts.
   • It arises from a conflict between expectations and how those expectations are met.
   • Impolite behavior can damage social identity and cause emotional harm.

2. Challenging Traditional Politeness Theories:

   • Classic politeness theories (Brown & Levinson, Leech) focus on harmony and cooperation.
   • Culpeper argues that these theories marginalize conflict and offensive interactions.
   • He emphasizes that impoliteness is not just a failure of politeness but an intentional, structured phenomenon.

3. Types of Impoliteness:

   • Conventionalized Impoliteness: Direct and formulaic, such as insults, dismissals, and threats.
   • Non-Conventionalized (Implicational) Impoliteness: Arises from mismatches between language and context (e.g., sarcasm, prosody).

4. Face and Social Norms:

   • Unlike traditional models prioritizing individual face (Goffman), Culpeper sees impoliteness as violating broader social norms.
   • Impoliteness does not always target face; it can also breach social expectations.

5. Intentionality and Emotional Impact:

   • Impoliteness can be intentional or unintentional.
   • Stronger intentionality enhances perceived offense, but unintentional impoliteness can also be harmful.
   • Emotional responses to impoliteness are shaped by cognitive appraisal over time.

6. Metapragmatics of Impoliteness:

   • Impoliteness has no universal label but overlaps with terms like verbal aggression, rudeness, and abuse.
   • Manuals, policies, and social rules shape the perception of what counts as impolite.

7. Power, Ideology, and Social Control:

   • Impoliteness can be used as a tool to assert dominance, challenge authority, or reinforce social hierarchies.
   • Coercive impoliteness reduces the target’s symbolic power.
   • Entertaining impoliteness (e.g., mockery, insults in comedy) serves aesthetic or voyeuristic functions.

8. Historical and Social Dimensions:

   • Impoliteness can be amplified over time through repetition (e.g., bullying).
   • Some offensive terms can be reclaimed and recontextualized (e.g., "queer" in LGBTQ+ activism).
   • Symbolic violence in language reflects and reinforces broader societal power dynamics.

Conclusion:

Culpeper’s work shifts the focus from politeness as a default interactional goal to impoliteness as a complex, systematic, and socially significant phenomenon. He highlights how language can be used aggressively, influencing power structures, identity, and emotions.

Impoliteness in a social context serves several functions, as identified by Culpeper (2011)35. These functions include affective, coercive, and entertaining impoliteness, all of which generally reinforce or oppose specific identities, interpersonal relationships, social norms, and/or ideologies1.

• Affective impoliteness involves the expression of emotion in contexts where it is considered inappropriate1. It can be an unrestrained display of emotion, such as laughter during a funeral, or a targeted display of heightened emotion, like anger, where the target is blamed for causing the negative emotional state13. For example, a person might express affective impoliteness by saying, "How dare you walk out on me like that! Who the hell do you think you are?"5.

• Coercive impoliteness aims to realign values between individuals, benefiting the person displaying impoliteness, either materially or symbolically1. This type of impoliteness often occurs where there is a power imbalance, such as between a boss and an employee, where the more powerful person is less concerned about retaliation15. An example of coercive impoliteness is a manager saying to their secretary, "I don’t care about what you are doing"5.

• Entertaining impoliteness provides entertainment at the expense of someone else and is thus always somewhat exploitative13. The target may not even be aware of the impoliteness, or may even be fictional1. For instance, someone might say, "What a pretty dress you wear tonight... Cause I’d like to have one...for my cat,"5. This is impolite but may be perceived as humorous by others3.

Impoliteness is a negative attitude toward specific behaviors in certain contexts and is influenced by expectations, desires, and beliefs about social norms24. It can be influenced by labels such as rude, discourteous, or ill-mannered4. These behaviors can cause offense and have emotional consequences for those involved24.

Citations:

1. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/impoliteness/functions.htm
2. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/impoliteness/definitions.htm
3. https://ejournal.iainpalopo.ac.id/index.php/ideas/article/download/3555/2416/14138
4. https://pragmatics.indiana.edu/politeness/impoliteness.html
5. http://scholar.unand.ac.id/457358/6/Text%20(Bab%201).%20pdf.pdf
6. https://eprints.unm.ac.id/14466/1/ARTICLE.pdf
7. https://etheses.iainkediri.ac.id/3688/13/932209617_bab2.pdf
8. https://jurnal.unimed.ac.id/2012/index.php/LTBI/article/download/52354/22329

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