Chapter One Introduction
Politeness and impoliteness are universal in human communication. It has been a long time since linguists have been concerned with politeness, especially after the coming out of Leech’s (1983) Politeness Principle (PP) and Brown & Levinson’s (1987) Face-Saving Theory (FST), which have aroused a large number of studies on this phenomenon, as manifested in DuFon’s (1994) 51-page list of bibliographies. Impoliteness, on the other hand, has not attracted the attention of many linguists. This, however, should not be the case since “impoliteness behavior is not a marginal activity” (Culpeper 1996: 349) and it also plays an important role in communication, as it threatens other’s face or decreases their power relationship, and may hence generate conflict and threat in conversation.
This study is concerned with impoliteness. Specifically, the research will be carried out employing a revised version of Culpeper’s (1996) and Bousfield’s (2008) framework of impoliteness. We will provide a contrastive analysis of the impoliteness strategies in the English and Chinese culture. It should be noted that when compared with politeness utterance, impoliteness utterance is not easy to come by in the real situation. Therefore, as a common practice, approximate practical situations like Drama (Culpeper 1996), TV play (Bousfield 2008) are investigated. Likewise, we will not collect data in the real situation. Rather, impolite utterances from episodes in two welcomed sitcoms, The Big Bang Theory made in America and Ipartment screened in China, will be analyzed. Ninety six episodes of the former and eighty eight episodes of the latter will be under our investigation.
This thesis consists of five chapters: Chapter one provides a general introduction to the present study. Chapter two is a literature review, which outlines previous studies of politeness and impoliteness at home and abroad. Chapter three provides a revised version of the classification of impoliteness strategies based on Culpeper (1996) and Bousfield (2008), which serves as the theoretical framework of the thesis. A brief introduction of the research methodology is also given in this chapter.. Chapter four describes the cases of a revised version of the classification of impoliteness strategies in The Big Bang Theory and Ipartment.
Chapter Two Literature Review
As noted in Elen (2001), Fraser (1978), and Kasper (1990), compared with the massive politeness studies in the literature, studies on impoliteness are relatively rare. Previous studies are mainly concerned with the definition and classification of impoliteness, impoliteness phenomenon in different contexts, as well as impoliteness and other social factors. In this chapter, we will provide a brief review of these studies.
2.1 Definitions of Impoliteness
Watts (2003) points out that impoliteness is an arguable term which is, was, and always will be existence. This opinion is echoed by Bousfield (2007), according to whom, constitute of impoliteness and how to define it remain controversial. For this reason, there have been numerous definitions in the literature. The following definitions are collected by Culpeper (2011: 19-21) and Bousfield & Locher (2008).
(1) ...impoliteness, the use of strategies that are designed to have the opposite effect that of social disruption (Culpeper 1996: 350).
(2) ...impoliteness, the use of communicative strategies designed to attack face, and thereby cause social conflict and disharmony (Culpeper 2003: 1546).
(3) Impoliteness comes about when (1) the speaker communicates face attack intentionally, or (2) the hearer perceives and/ or constructs behavior as intentionally face-attacking, or a combination of (1) and (2) (Culpeper 2005: 38).
(4) [rude behavior] does not utilise politeness strategies where they would be expected, in such a way that utterance can only almost plausibly be interpreted as intentionally and negatively confrontational (Lakoff 1989: 103).
(5) ...rudeness is defined as a face threatening act (FAT) - or feature of an FTA such as intonation - which violates a socially sanctioned norm of interaction of the social context in which it occurs (Beebe 1995: 159).
(6) ...impoliteness, communicative strategies designed to attack face, and thereby cause social conflict and disharmony...(Culpeper et al. 2003: 1546).
(7) ...verbal impoliteness [is] linguistic behaviour assessed by the hearer as threatening her or his face or social identity, and infringing the norms of appropriate behaviour that prevail in particular contexts and among particular interlocutors, whether intentionally or not (Holmes et al. 2008: 196).
(8) Communicative aggression is defined as any recurring set of message that function to impair a person’s enduring preferred self image...(Dailey et al. 2007: 303, original emphasis).
(9) [Social harm involves] damage to the social identity of target persons and a lowering of their power or status. Social harm may be imposed by insults, reproaches, sarcasm, and various types of impolite behavior (Tedeschi & Felson 1994: 171).
2.2 Classifications of Impoliteness
Culpeper (1996) divides impoliteness into inherent impoliteness and mock impoliteness. According to him, in some examples “the conjunction of act or context does give rise to impoliteness that may be said to be inherent”. By attracting attention to an undesirable aspect of addressee, the utterance generates inevitable damage to his or her positive face. On the other hand, mock impoliteness, or banter, is impoliteness that “it is not intended to cause offence”, which remains on the surface (Culpeper 2008: 350-353).
Following Goffman’s (1967) suggestion, Bousfiled (2008) classifies impoliteness into intentional threats to face, incidental threats to face, and accidental threats to face, which are types of action that may lead to face damage. Intentional threats to face may appear to have acted “maliciously and spitefully, with the intention of causing open insult”. Incidental threats to face may arise as an “unplanned but sometimes anticipated by product of action”, “though not out of spite”. Accidental threats to face may appear to have acted innocently or his offence “seems to be unintended and unwitting” (Bousfield 2008: 67-71). Bousfield also points out that theoretically a specific action can cause all the three damages to face, and this three-way distinction, at least primarily, is based upon the speaker’s intention.
Babra Kryk-Kastovsky (2006) distinguishes overt impoliteness from covert impoliteness, based on whether the impoliteness is caused by surface structure semantics and implicit meaning.
Yangzi & Yu Guodong (2007), taking into consideration of the realization forms, objects of impoliteness, the speaker’s intended message and degree of perceiving, classify impoliteness into: (1) non-strategic impoliteness, (2) strategic impoliteness, (3) impoliteness due to pragmatics failures.
Li Yuansheng (2006) categorizes impoliteness into strategic and non-strategic verbal impoliteness. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the impoliteness speech acts which are used for effective strategies in Chinese from mental world, social world as well as physical world. And he distinguishes intentional impoliteness from unintentional impoliteness based on the speaker’s recognition.
Chapter Three Theoretical Framework and Research Methodology.....................11
3.1 Theoretical Framework ...........................11
3.1.1 Culpeper’s Classification.................................11
Chapter Four Contrastive Analysis of Impoliteness Strategies in The Big Bang Theory and Ipartment ..................17
4.1 Introduction........................17
4.2 The Cases from The Big Bang Theory ..........................17
Chapter Five Conclusion ............................59
5.1 Summary of the Thesis .........................59
5.2 Limitations..............................60
Chapter Four Contrastive Analysis of Impoliteness Strategies in The Big Bang Theory and Ipartment
4.1 Introduction
In this chapter, we will use data from The Big Bang Theory and Ipartment, and adopt seasons 4 to 7 which includes 96 episodes from The Big Bang Theory as well as the first 4 seasons which includes 80 episodes from Ipartment as my corpus. Because the impoliteness language in these two sitcoms are representative, and not naturally occurred in our daily life, in order to make a contribution to the English learners and the fans of the two sitcoms, The Big Bang Theory and Ipartment will be chosen to make a contrastive analysis of the impoliteness languages in English and Chinese. The structure of this chapter contains the cases from The Big Bang Theory, the cases from Ipartment, utterances not realized in Culpeper’s (1996) strategies, and discussions.
Chapter Five Conclusion
5.1 Summary of the Thesis
Politeness and impoliteness both universally exist in human communication. The research on the field of politeness should focus both politeness and impoliteness phenomena. However, researchers have long placed emphasis on politeness research, ignoring impoliteness exploration. Nowadays, scholars are getting to realize this point, and starting to achieve valuable findings in the study of impoliteness. Some of the aspects of impoliteness have been investigated in much depth, while others are still in urgent need of exploration, and thorough contrastive analysis of impoliteness strategies in English and Chinese belongs to the latter. This study takes up the challenging task. It is carried out employing a revised version of Culpeper’s (1996) and Bousfield’s (2008) framework of impoliteness, with the examined data collected from episodes in The Big Bang Theory and Ipartment, two welcomed sitcoms created in the US and China respectively.
In our revised version, 4 new strategies are put forward for the first time, which includes shouting to the other loudly, changing the topic of conversation, imitating other’s voice, and racial discrimination. It is found that sarcasm is the most impoliteness strategy used in both English and Chinese context. Criticizing is the second most-used strategy in English, and frightening is the second most popular impoliteness strategy in Chinese. Shouting to the other loudly and changing the topic of conversation are more often used in Chinese. While in English-speaking countries using inappropriate identity markers often appears in their conversation. Moreover, The frequency of utilization of excluding the other from activity, snubbing, being disinterested, seeking disagreement, using taboo words, invading the other’s space, personalizing, putting the other’s indebtedness on record, challenges, and imitating other’s voice are almost the same in both languages. Though using obscure or secretive language has not been found in the corpus, Culpeper (1996)’s strategy “put the other’s indebtedness on record” has been presented a certain appearance in this paper, which has not been realized in his corpus, and racial discrimination is only found in the English context.
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