The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.

) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

Impoliteness
Jonathan Culpeper, Lancaster University, UK

1. Conceptual characteristics
Just as politeness seems to have resisted definition (cf. (Bargiela Chiappini 2003: 1464), so
has impoliteness. Nevertheless, certain concepts are regularly part of definitions.

Face and facework

Many researchers incorporate the notion of face in their definitions of impoliteness (e.g.
Lachenicht 1980; Culpeper 1996; Bousfield 2008). The English idiom ‘losing face’ refers to
the damage one’s public image suffers, often resulting in emotions such as humiliation or
embarrassment (we briefly return to the topic of emotions below). As Goffman puts it (1967:
5), face is:

the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others
assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self delineated in
terms of approved social attributes.

Note that it is not just the positive values that you yourself want, but what you can claim
about yourself from what others assume about you. Obviously, issues of identity are tied up
with the notion of face (see, for example, the special issue on face, identity and (im)politeness
in the Journal of Politeness Research, 2013, volume 9, issue 1). Some impoliteness
phenomena very clearly relate to face, insults being a good example. But there are other
phenomena that seem less directly connected to face. Some impoliteness involves violations
of perceived rights, for example, the right to a ‘turn’ after those, and only those, queuing in
front of you have been attended to. Spencer-Oatey’s (2008: 13) concept of ‘sociality rights’ is
useful here. Spencer-Oatey (2008:13-14) defines them thus:

The management of sociality rights and obligations […] involves the management of
social expectancies, which I define as ‘fundamental social entitlements that a person
effectively claims for him/herself in his/her interactions with others’. In other words,
face is associated with personal/relational/social value, and is concerned with people’s
sense of worth, dignity, honour, reputation, competence and so on. Sociality rights
and obligations, on the other hand, are concerned with social expectancies, and reflect
people’s concerns over fairness, consideration and behavioural appropriateness.
Cult-
Needless to say, the positive values of face and of rights and obligations vary considerably
from culture to culture (Mills 2009).
Goffman’s (1967:12) definition of face work appears to have nothing to do with
impoliteness:

By face-work I mean to designate the actions taken by a person to make whatever he

[sic] is doing consistent with face. Face-work serves to counteract “incidents” – that
is, events whose effective symbolic implications threaten face.

However, he briefly touches on aggressive face work, where “the threat will be wilfully
introduced” (1967:24-5). Nevertheless, it remained for later researchers to develop this area.
Craig et al. (1986: 456-461) seem to have been the first to discuss face-attack or face

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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

aggravation in relation to politeness theory. They point out the consequences for Brown and
Levinson’s ([1978] 1987) model of failing to treat face-attack strategies systematically,
demonstrating that descriptive holes will be left in the analysis of data. Scholars developing
accounts of face-attack include Austin (1990), Penman (1990) and Tracy and Tracy (1998).
More recently, relational approaches to politeness (e.g. Holmes and Schnurr 2005; Locher
and Watts 2005; and Spencer-Oatey 2008) − which focus on the analysis of interpersonal
relations and facework − have relatively unproblematically accommodated impoliteness-
related phenomena.

Intentionality
Intentionality would seem to be an important element in helping us distinguish intentional
cases (where somebody intended to offend, hatched a plan to carry out that offence, and
carried it out with full awareness) from cases where somebody inadvertently caused offence
(through, for example, a faux pas). Consider Bousfield’s (2008: 72; my emphasis) definition
of impoliteness:

Impoliteness constitutes the communication of intentionally gratuitous and

conflictive verbal face-threatening acts which are purposefully delivered: (1)
unmitigated […], and /or (ii) with deliberate aggression […]

Of course, from the target’s point of view we are dealing with perceptions of speaker
intention. Culpeper’s (2005: 38; slightly simplified; my emphasis) definition accommodated
both the speaker’s and the hearer’s perceptions of intention:

Impoliteness comes about when: (1) the speaker communicates face-attack

intentionally, or (2) the hearer perceives behaviour as intentionally face-attacking,
or a combination of (1) and (2).

However, it emerged from my analysis of 100 narrative reports from British undergraduates
describing an impoliteness event, and also from the work of others (e.g. Gabriel 1998), that
sometimes people both construe an act as both unintentional and offensive, and also describe
it as rude or impolite. In other words, impoliteness does not have to be fully intentional,
whether from a speaker or hearer perspective. Consequently, in Culpeper (2011) full
intentionality is not a necessary condition. I argued that not all impoliteness is intentional,
because sometimes the producer of impoliteness is not aware of the impoliteness effects they
are causing, and being aware is a key part of the notion of intentionality (Malle and Knobe
1997). The act is considered impolite nevertheless, because the producer is blamed for not
predicting those effects (see Ferguson and Rule 1986, on attributions of blame). In my data,
this tended to occur in close relationships where one person is likely to think that the other
one should have known better.

Emotion
Blitvich (2010: 69; referencing Kienpointner 2008b: 41) points out that “we tend to associate
impoliteness, but not necessarily politeness, with true emotions”. Goffman noted the
emotional consequences of face loss:

If events establish a face for him [sic] that is better than he might have expected, he is
likely to ‘feel good’; if his ordinary expectations are not filled, one expects that he
will ‘feel bad’ or ‘feel hurt’. (1967: 6)

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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

He may become embarrassed and chagrined; he may become shamefaced (1967:8)

However, little empirical research has investigated precisely what emotions are associated
with impoliteness. In Culpeper (2011: 63-5), I hypothesised that different emotions are
experienced by the target when they experience face-related impoliteness as opposed to
sociality rights-related impoliteness. A study consisting of 100 reports of conversations in
which the informant had felt bad supplied by British undergraduates lend support to this
hypothesis. For reports of face-related events, descriptors of emotions clustered into groups
such as embarrassed, humiliated, stupid, hurt and upset. For reports of sociality rights-related
impoliteness, specifically to do with equity, those groups were important too, but we also see
a doubling of items related to anger.

Metalanguage
Some recent work on politeness has bewailed the fact that scholars, including the authors of
the much cited study of politeness by Brown and Levinson (1987), have constructed “pseudo-
scientific” politeness theories that seem remote from or pay little attention to the layperson’s
usage of politeness terms (e.g. polite, tactful, courteous) and what they might describe (e.g.
Eelen 2001; Watts 2003). Politeness, they argue, is a notion that is constructed and contested
in discourse, and looking at those constructions and contexts will provide a firmer ontological
basis for politeness studies than has been the case hitherto. Even if one does not accept (or
not fully accept) that the way forward for politeness studies is the investigation of the
layperson’s usage, all politeness or impoliteness studies need to adopt a metalanguage to
describe politeness or impoliteness. Rather oddly however, scholars, of whatever persuasion,
have not done much to investigate the layperson’s metalanguage (for rare examples, see Ide
et al. 1992, and Haugh and Hinze 2003).
Languages are replete with terms for behaviours considered impolite. In my view,
there is much to be gained from investigating their usage. What they mean to people can
provide insights into what they think impoliteness is. In English they include: impolite, rude,
discourteous, hurtful, insulting, disrespectful, derogatory, arrogant, brusque and sarcastic. In
Culpeper (2011: chapter 3), using traditional thesauri, I noted that the items impolite, rude,
(verbally) abusive, offensive and, to a slightly lesser extent, (verbally) aggressive form a
cohesive semantic set with some specific characteristics. Corpus analyses confirmed that rude
is the most popular term in British and American English; in contrast with impoliteness,
which has hardly any currency. This makes impoliteness a good candidate for use as a blanket
term (Tracy 2008: 173 argues that face-attack should be the generic term). I also revealed that
impolite is not synonymous with rude but more precisely matches a subset of its meanings.
They are both, for example, regularly applied in public service contexts (specifically as
grammatical complements to subjects such as bartender, waiter, staff), where there are
expectations of service entitlements. They also both, for example, regularly describe actions
such as eavesdropping, interrupting, pointing, ignoring, and declining, actions which relate to
unwarranted impositions or exclusions. These actions relate to sociality rights.

My recent work led me to a revised definition of impoliteness:

Impoliteness is a negative attitude towards specific behaviours occurring in specific

contexts. It is sustained by expectations, desires and /or beliefs about social
organisation, including, in particular, how one person's or a group's identities are
mediated by others in interaction. Situated behaviours are viewed negatively −
considered "impolite" − when they conflict with how one expects them to be, how one
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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

wants them to be and/or how one thinks they ought to be. Such behaviours always
have or are presumed to have emotional consequences for at least one participant, that
is, they cause or are presumed to cause offence. Various factors can exacerbate how
offensive an impolite behaviour is taken to be, including for example whether one
understands a behaviour to be strongly intentional or not. (Culpeper 2011:23)

A clarification of the first sentence is in order. A reviewer of this article rightly points out that
impoliteness is not the attitude itself but certain types of behaviour in relation to which
members of a speech community maintain a negative attitude.
Although this definition lacks the succinctness of my earlier one, it better
accommodates the empirical data. Bousfield also revised his definition of impoliteness.
Bousfield (2010: 118-24) suggests that the notion of impoliteness can be conceived of as a
prototype. Such an approach can usefully account for the fact that the prototypical cases of
impoliteness do, for example, involve intention, including the speaker’s awareness of it and
the hearer’s perception of it, but the approach does not restrict itself to only those cases.

2. Impoliteness strategies
Pragmatic strategies are ways of achieving particular goals in interaction. Brown and
Levinson (1987) make a useful distinction between politeness superstrategies and output
strategies. The former are of a higher order and involve the overall orientation of the act; the
latter are the more specific means by which the superstrategies are pursued. The impoliteness
superstrategies and example output strategies I proposed in Culpeper (1996: 356-7) are as
follows (incorporating one revision proposed in Culpeper 2005):

Impoliteness superstrategies
Bald on record impoliteness: the FTA is performed in a direct, clear, unambiguous
and concise way in circumstances where face is not irrelevant or minimized.
Positive impoliteness: the use of strategies designed to damage the addressee’s
positive face wants, e.g. ignore the other, exclude the other from an activity, be
disinterested, unconcerned, unsympathetic, use inappropriate identity markers, use
obscure or secretive language, seek disagreement, use taboo words, call the other
names.
Negative impoliteness: the use of strategies designed to damage the addressee’s
negative face wants, e.g. frighten, condescend, scorn or ridicule, be contemptuous, do
not treat the other seriously, belittle the other, invade the other’s space (literally or
metaphorically), explicitly associate the other with a negative aspect (personalize, use
the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘You’), put the other’ s indebtedness on record.
Off-record impoliteness: the FTA is performed by means of an implicature but in such
a way that one attributable intention clearly outweighs any others.
Withhold politeness: the absence of politeness work where it would be expected. For
example, failing to thank somebody for a present may be taken as deliberate
impoliteness.

Impoliteness meta-strategy
Sarcasm or mock politeness: the FTA is performed with the use of politeness
strategies that are obviously insincere, and thus remain surface realisations.

As with Brown and Levinson (1987), what underlies these strategies is Grice’s (1975)
Cooperative Principle (CP). Bald on record impoliteness, for example, involves upholding the
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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

CP, whilst Off-record impoliteness involves flouting it. Sarcasm or mock impoliteness has its
roots in Leech’s Grice-based Irony Principle (1983). Describing impoliteness in terms of a
Cooperative Principle may sound like a non-starter. However, that impression is based on a
misunderstanding of the CP. As has been argued by a number of scholars (e.g. Thomas 1986;
Pavlidou 1991), the CP applies to cooperation in the exchange of information, not in
facilitating social goals. To be impolite, one still needs to cooperate in the exchange of
information, i.e. uphold the CP at some level, in order to get one’s impolite message across
(for further elaboration, see Bousfield 2008: Chapter 2). Nevertheless, impoliteness theorists,
with the notable exception of Terkourafi (2009), have done little to think through a Gricean
account of impoliteness. Most treat the strategies as rhetorical strategies: conventional ways
of using communicative resources to facilitate goals.
The impoliteness strategies have been challenged, and, not surprisingly, largely on the
same grounds that people have challenged Brown and Levinson’s work. However, most of
the challenges are to do with the superstrategies. Bousfield (2008) suggests two revisions of
the superstrategies. One is to combine positive and negative impoliteness. This helps solve
the problem that positive and negative impoliteness, as with politeness, are often so
thoroughly mixed that meaningful separation is difficult. The other is the insight that the bald
on-record category involves face as well.
In contrast, the impoliteness output strategies constitute a robust set. Bousfield (2008)
utilises the same basic set as Culpeper (1996) with a couple of additions. Moreover, a number
of other studies deploy that set, showing it to be effective (e.g. Cashman 2006, Lorenzo-Dus
et al. 2011; Shum and Lee 2013; Murphy in press). I had devised those strategies largely
through doing qualitative and then (semi) quantitative analysis of impoliteness events. In
Culpeper (2011: chapter 3), I took a different tack. I considered meta-pragmatic impoliteness
commentaries – people talking or writing about ways in which they or others or impolite.
More specifically, I analysed manuals on and parodies of rudeness. These represent
communities talking about strategies which they recognise and which have a conventional
status. What emerged maps well onto the set of output strategies outlined above.
Finally, a word of warning. The most heinous crime when performing an analysis of
impoliteness strategies, or politeness for that matter, is to simply count them up on the
assumption that if the strategy is there it necessarily is performing impoliteness. This
assumption cannot be relied upon. Calling somebody names, for example, could be for the
purpose of banter and thus a matter of cementing solidarity, not causing offence. This is not
to say that these strategies cannot be used as a framework for quantitative analysis. But one
must be sure to count both the appearance of the strategy plus an interpretation that it is taken
as impolite in its context.

3. Impoliteness formulae
Impoliteness has its own set of conventionalised impoliteness formulae. I understand
conventionalisation here in the same way as Terkourafi (e.g. 2002, 2003) discussing
politeness formulae, namely, items conventionalised for a certain context of use (they involve
generalised implicatures in minimal contexts, cf. Levinson 1995). Note here that there is
absolutely no claim that such items have completely stable polite meanings, that they are
polite in all contexts of use. How does one identify such items? For such items to count as
polite they must go unchallenged (e.g. Terkourafi 2005; Haugh 2007; see also the discussion
of reciprocity in section 4). Thus, a compliment is accepted; holding a door open for
somebody receives “thank you”; “please” accompanying a request meets with compliance or
polite refusal. Such actions are part of what constructs politeness contexts. Conversely, for
such items to count as impolite they must go challenged. Evidence of challenges includes,
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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

notably, counter impoliteness (tit-for-tat pairings), but also meta-pragmatic comments (e.g.
“that was so rude”), indications, verbal or non-verbal, of offence being experienced (i.e.
symptoms of emotions such as humiliation, hurt or anger). Such actions are part of what
constructs impoliteness contexts. How does one know that the formulae might be
conventional? What one needs here is evidence of regularity of use in a particular context. In
my work, notably Culpeper (2011), I generated candidates for consideration from copious
qualitative analyses, and then verified their robustness in the two-billion word Oxford English
Corpus, operating the criterion that are least 50% of the cases had to be accompanied by
evidence of impoliteness for it to count as a conventionalised impoliteness formula. The
resulting list of impoliteness formulae is as follows (square brackets are designed to give an
indication of some of the structural characteristics of the formulae; alternatives are indicated
with slashes):

Insults
1. Personalized negative vocatives
- [you] [fucking/rotten/dirty/fat/little/etc.][moron/fuck/plonker/dickhead/
berk/pig/shit/bastard/loser/liar/ minx/brat/slut/squirt/sod/bugger etc.] [you]
2. Personalized negative assertions
- [you] [are] [so/such a] [shit/stink/thick/stupid/bitchy/bitch/hypocrite/
disappointment/gay/nuts/nuttier than a fruit cake/hopeless/pathetic/fussy/
terrible/fat/ugly/etc.]
- [you] [can’t do] [anything right/basic arithmetic/etc.]
- [you] [disgust me] / [make me] [sick/etc.]
3. Personalized negative references
- [your] [stinking/little] [mouth/act/arse/body/corpse/hands/guts/trap/breath/etc.]
4. Personalized third-person negative references (in the hearing of the target)
- [the] [daft] [bimbo]
- [she[ ['s] [nutzo]

Pointed criticisms/complaints
- [that/this/it] [is/was] [absolutely/extraordinarily/unspeakably/etc.][bad/
rubbish/crap/horrible/terrible/etc.]

Unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions

- why do you make my life impossible?
- which lie are you telling me?
- what's gone wrong now?
- you want to argue with me or you want to go to jail?

Condescensions (see also the use of "little" in Insults)

- [that] [’s/ is being] [babyish/childish/etc.]

Message enforcers
- listen here (preface)
- you got [it/that]? (tag)
- do you understand [me]? (tag)

Dismissals
- [go] [away]
- [get] [lost/out]

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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

- [fuck/piss/shove] [off]

Silencers
- [shut] [it] / [your] [stinking/fucking/etc.] [mouth/face/trap/etc.]
- shut [the fuck] up

Threats
- [I’ll/I’m/we’re] [gonna] [smash your face in/beat the shit out of you/box your
ears/bust your fucking head off/straighten you out/etc.] [if you don't] [X]
- [you'd better be ready Friday the 20th to meet with me/do it] [or] [else] [I'll] [X]
- [X] [before I] [hit you/strangle you]

Negative expressives (e.g. curses, ill-wishes)

- [go] [to hell/hang yourself/fuck yourself]
- [damn/fuck] [you]
(Culpeper 2011: 135-6)

One can see that the first three categories would fit positive impoliteness, whilst the remainder would
fit negative impoliteness. The first category, insults, is by far the most numerous.
This is of course a list of impoliteness formulae in British English. Note that it does
not include taboo words or behaviours. Such items can trigger a judgement of impoliteness,
but they seem to do this per se extremely rarely − a mere two cases occurred in my 100 diary
reports. In most cases taboo words operate in conjunction with impoliteness formulae such as
those above, in order to exacerbate them. The intensification of conventional impolite
formulae is important: it is part of what makes them attitudinally extreme, less equivocal and
more likely to cause the target to take offence (cf. Young 2004). Prosodic intensification,
such as wide pitch range, sharp pitch falls, or high amplitude, is also common. Note also that
the list does not include non-verbal visual impoliteness (e.g. spitting, two or one fingered
gestures, rolling one’s eyes).

4. Contextual dynamics
It is obvious, not least from some comments made above, that impoliteness is context
sensitive. Different cultures have different perceptions of the positive values that make up
face or the rights and obligations that feed into sociality rights. But there are further dynamics
at play in any impoliteness event. I will briefly touch on the co-text (especially whether that
co-text involves politeness or impoliteness), interpersonal factors and situational factors.
Both politeness and impoliteness are governed by a principle of reciprocity (cf.
associated references in Culpeper 2011: 203-7). A polite approach to somebody sets up
expectations of a polite response. One of the consequences of this is that an impolite
response, or even one speaker shifting from politeness to impoliteness, seems even more
impolite than had it appeared at the beginning of the interaction (see Afifi and Burgoon 2000:
226-8). Reciprocal impolite exchanges are also not uncommon. People tend not to "turn the
other cheek", but to retaliate in kind in British and North American cultures (e.g. A: “You
moron”, B: “You idiot”, etc.). Research in aggression has repeatedly shown that verbal
insults and taunts are often reciprocated (see the references given in Baron and Richardson
1994: 142). Countering with impoliteness – something which Kienpointner (1997: 266) labels
"reactive rudeness" – is a way of restoring face loss that might have resulted from the initial
impoliteness. There is also the fact that impoliteness produces a state of emotional arousal in
the target and this increases the likelihood that the target will retaliate in kind (Jay 2000: 60).

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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

The connection between politeness and impoliteness is also articulated in sarcasm and banter.
With impolite sarcasm, politeness formulae, which are conventionally associated with
politeness contexts, are re-contextualised and used in impoliteness contexts (e.g. saying
“thank you” when somebody slams a door in your face). With the polite banter, impoliteness
formulae, are re-contextualised and used in politeness contexts (e.g. saying “you bastard” to
somebody in order to imply that you feel close to them). The impact of sarcasm and banter
may be achieved by reminding hearers of the distance between politeness and impoliteness,
or vice versa. This point is articulated by Giora (2003: 94) in her work on salience and irony:

The salient literal meaning of irony functions as a reference point relative to which the
ironicized situation is to be assessed and criticised. What irony conveys, then, is
frustration with or dissociation from what is referred to, rather than from what is said -
- that is, from the opinion or thought expressed by what is said. Indeed what is said
often alludes to the desired situation/opinion/thought that the criticised state of affairs
fails to comply with. The intended meaning is the realisation of the extent to which
the state of affairs in question has fallen short of expectations usually made explicit by
what is said. (Giora 2003: 94)

What about interpersonal factors? Perhaps the most important factor here is power. In
Culpeper (2011), I reported a study of 100 impoliteness events recorded by British
undergraduates. 133 of the total of 200 descriptive labels that informants supplied for those
events fell into 6 groups (in order of predominance): patronising, inconsiderate, rude,
aggressive, inappropriate and hurtful. Patronising behaviour (including condescending,
belittling, ridiculing and demeaning behaviours) involves an abuse of power, producing or
perceiving a display of power that infringes an understood power hierarchy. A further study
reported in that work examined requests in situations of extreme power difference, for
example, a defendant telling the judge to be quiet or an army recruit telling the sergeant
major to be quiet. What this revealed was that being in a position of power licensed your talk:
even the very direct utterance “you be quiet” was not perceived as impolite. Conversely, even
indirect utterances such as “could you be quiet” or “you aren’t being quiet” are perceived as
impolite if they’re coming from a speaker of very low relative power. The importance of
power in relation to impoliteness is reflected in the fact that the first collected volume on
impoliteness, Bousfield and Locher (2008), actually focused on impoliteness and power.
Situations, constituted by language and contextual features, and described in terms of,
for example, communities of practice or activity types can sanction or legitimate impoliteness
(see for example Mills 2003, Watts 2003). In army training discourse, for example, the
training officers are licensed to use forms of language that might be construed as impolite.
This licensing is sustained by institutional power structures. Another example would be the
British House of Commons, where normally impolite accusations of, for example,
incompetence or lying are licensed, as long as certain discourse practices are adhered to (e.g.
particular terms of address) (Harris 2001). I have argued, however, that we must be careful
not to conflate the terms “sanctioning” and “neutralising” (Culpeper 2005). One can have a
context in which the use of impoliteness is sanctioned but people can still take offence – it is
not neutralised. Impolite behaviours are highly salient and closely associated with particular
emotional reactions. It is difficult for an awareness of the context to be more salient and thus
for the context to neutralise the impoliteness. Thus, for example, contestants on game shows
often get offended by negative comments on their performances, even though they should
know that it is all a game.

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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness. In: Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.) Handbook
of Pragmatics. 2013 Installment. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-18. It may contain minor errors and
infelicities.

5. Functions of impoliteness
Three key functional types of impoliteness event emerged in my data, which included
narrative reports of impoliteness events, corpus data and numerous examples, including video
recordings, collected over 15 years of research (see Culpeper 2011: chapter 6). Affective
impoliteness can simply involve the unrestrained expression of emotion in contexts where it
is prohibited or not normal. A more instrumental variant involves the targeted display of
heightened emotion, typically anger, with the implication that the target is to blame for
producing that negative emotional state (pronominal patterns involving “you” and “me” are
typical). Coercive impoliteness seeks a realignment of values between the producer and the
target such that the producer benefits or has their current benefits reinforced or protected.
Insults and threats seem to be typical of this kind of impoliteness. I would predict that
coercive impoliteness is more likely to occur in situations where there is an imbalance of
social structural power, though it can also be used in more equal relationships to engineer a
gain in power. Entertaining impoliteness involves entertainment at the expense of the target
(or potential target) of the impoliteness, and is thus always exploitative to a degree. There are
a number of sources of pleasure that can be involved in entertainment impoliteness, but
aesthetic pleasure is perhaps the most interesting, as it is here that the connection with
creativity is clearest. Several works have highlighted the affinity between impoliteness and
literature (e.g. Culpeper 1996, 1998; Rudanko 2006). A common myth about impoliteness is
that it is a mere emotional reflex articulated in a simplistic language. In fact, impoliteness can
be highly creative. Just as all creativity requires a backdrop, potential politeness is in the
background of impoliteness, and the higher the politeness threshold the stronger the potential
for impoliteness. In Culpeper (2011: chapter 6), I identified four types of creativity in the
extant literature − pattern-re-forming, pattern-forming, situational deviation and unusual
implicitness − and demonstrated that they all can exist in impoliteness events. Further,
Kienpointner (2008a, 2008b) demonstrates how impoliteness and the expression of emotions
are strategically used as part of argumentation strategies.

6. Future directions
An obvious direction for future impoliteness studies concerns applications. Impoliteness has
been applied to domains as a diverse as 911 telephone calls in North America (Tracy and
Tracy 1998), courtroom discourse (e.g. Archer 2008) and reality TV shows (e.g. Lorenzo-
Dus 2009). A particularly fruitful area for the study of impoliteness is CMC (e.g. Hardaker
2010; Lorenzo-Dus et al. 2011; Perelmutter 2010, 2013). One of the major challenges these
papers have confronted is the issue of participation. The new media are usually far away from
a simple speaker-hearer dyad. We have multiple speakers and multiple hearers performing
multiple discourse roles. Another area concerns how impoliteness is constituted. Impoliteness
studies have yet to fully embrace the multimodality of interaction (see, for example, Culpeper
et al 2003 and Culpeper 2005, for some first steps in the area of prosody). Finally, a little
explored area concerns impoliteness and emotion (see, for example, Culpeper 2011: 55-65,
221-5; and also Langlotz and Locher 2012).

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