Discourse & Society

http://das.sagepub.com/

Book review: Jonathan Culpeper, Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause

Offence
Li Chengtuan
Discourse Society 2013 24: 829
DOI: 10.1177/0957926513490318a

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://das.sagepub.com/content/24/6/829.citation

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Discourse & Society can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://das.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

>> Version of Record - Nov 18, 2013

What is This?

Downloaded from das.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE ANTIOQUIA on November 3, 2014

Book reviews 829

caption) and intrasemiotic (image vs image; caption vs caption) relations. Chapters 6 and
7 recommend two specific frameworks (evaluation and composition) for an in-depth
analysis of language and image in news discourse.
The third part, Chapters 8 and 9, includes two case studies: one is the analysis of an
image and the evaluation of language in a ‘stand-alone’ news story (Chapter 8) and the
other is a study of online news, using the concepts suggested in this book (Chapter 9).
Distinct from other books on media discourse, this volume contextualizes news dis-
course from the perspective of news communication (between the news producers and
the news audience). Furthermore, the book offers some insights and exemplary analysis
to the interplay between the verbal and the image represented in news discourse (Chapters
7 to 9). However, this attempt is much more focused on the play between the verbal and
the still images typical in newspaper or online news. Relations between the words and
the dynamic images in broadcast news or the news in social media platforms have not
been systematically mapped and analysed.
In any case, it is understandable that, due to space constraints, News Discourse cannot
be loaded with all aspects of news across genres and media platforms. Nonetheless, it
sorts out the key issues explicitly or implicitly concerned with news discourse and it will
serve a useful purpose as a resource book for scholars and teachers in media discourse
and media communication studies.

Jonathan Culpeper, Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2011; viii + 288 pp.

Reviewed by: Li Chengtuan, School of English Language and Education, Guangdong

University of Foreign Studies, People’s Republic of China

In Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence, Jonathan Culpeper provides a

cutting-edge scholarly account of how impolite behaviour works. The author offers us
a deep insight into its definition, forms and functions, and the emotional responses to
impoliteness, with analysis of a wide range of natural language data sources including
diary reports, the Oxford English Corpus, dialogue on TV game shows and chat shows,
a documentary about army recruit training, and graffiti on desks. Grounded in related
theories of linguistic pragmatics and social psychology, this book adds to the growing
scholarship on politeness and impoliteness.
In Chapter 1, the author first reviews the commonalities in prior scholars’ definition
of impoliteness, then comes to his own delimitation of it, which consists of the following
components: violating the hearer’s social norm-based expectation, causing offence or
emotional consequences, and other factors affecting the perceptions of the hearer includ-
ing the speaker’s intentionality. The author uses Helen Spencer-Oatey’s rapport manage-
ment categories to probe into types of offence among five different cultures (British,
Chinese, Finnish, German, Turkish).
Chapter 2 focuses on key concepts constituting the notion of impoliteness, and inten-
tionality and emotion, the former somehow downplayed and the latter emphasized for
their respective role in evaluating impoliteness. The author then categorizes the

Downloaded from das.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE ANTIOQUIA on November 3, 2014

830 Discourse & Society 24(6)

emotional perceptions of impoliteness and puts forward an integrated socio-cognitive

model of understanding impoliteness.
Chapter 3 studies impoliteness metalanguage/metadiscourse with the corpus method-
ology, revealing the frequency and genre of such metalinguistic labels as rude, inappro-
priate, aggressive and impolite in academia, and proposes a mapping of impoliteness
metalinguistic labels in conceptual space. The author then distinguishes impoliteness
metalinguistic comments from metalinguistic expressions by considering the case of
over-politeness, and formulates impoliteness metapragmatic rules both in public and
private settings.
In Chapter 4, the author argues that impoliteness is partly inherent in linguistic expres-
sions and examines relatively context-spanning conventionalized impoliteness expres-
sions like threats, swear words and insults. The author then proposes that conventionalized
impoliteness formulae vary according to three scales: the degree of conventionalization,
the extent to which they are context-dependent, and the degree of offence they are associ-
ated with. The last section of this chapter discusses two ways of intensifying the conven-
tionalized impoliteness formulae, that is, through message intensity and non-verbal,
especially prosodic, intensification.
Chapter 5 examines implicational impoliteness, focusing on its linguistic triggers.
The author distinguishes between three types of impolite implicatures. The first type,
form-driven impoliteness, is triggered by formal surface or semantic aspects of behav-
iour and has negative consequences for certain individuals. The typical cases are innu-
endo, snide remarks and mocking mimicry. The second type of implicational impoliteness
is convention-driven. Its linguistic triggers involve the context projected conventionally
by the behaviour trigger mismatching either the context projected by another part of the
behaviour (an internal mismatch) or the context of use (an external mismatch). They
cover everyday notions such as sarcasm. The third type of implicational impoliteness is
context-driven. Its triggers involve whether behaviour is unmarked or altogether absent
in contexts where it is clearly expected – it mismatches contextual expectations.
Chapter 6 discusses the effects of co-text and context in interpreting impoliteness
events. The author considers the event contexts where impoliteness is in some sense
habitual or normal. The author then examines the recontextualization of conventional-
ized impoliteness formulae, with the result that they are construed as mock rather than
genuine impoliteness.
Chapter 7 describes the functions of impoliteness and, more specifically, impoliteness
events. The author illustrates three key functions with a detailed analysis of a natural
text. The first kind, affective function, involves ‘the targeted display of heightened emo-
tion, typically anger, with the implication that the target is to blame for producing that
negative emotional state’ (p. 223). The second type is coercive impoliteness that seeks a
realignment of values between the speaker and the hearer, such that the speaker benefits
or has their current benefits reinforced or protected. The third type is entertaining impo-
liteness which seeks to entertain the third-party audience at the expense of the target of
the impoliteness event. The author proposes five sources of pleasure and suggests that
the way to get aesthetic pleasure is through linguistic creativity. The author also dis-
cusses the institutional impoliteness which is guided by the speaker’s collective inten-
tions of keeping the institutional ideology unchallenged.

Downloaded from das.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE ANTIOQUIA on November 3, 2014

Book reviews 831

Chapter 8 concludes the book by returning to the definition of impoliteness, covering

the main points the author has discussed and including a summary table of impoliteness
strategies and formulae discussed in the book. The author also points out the potential for
future research, especially the diachronic study of impoliteness both on a personal and a
community level.
This book gives a thorough and systemic analysis of linguistic impoliteness in interac-
tions. The book deserves a wide readership for two reasons. First, the book fills a gap in
interpersonal politeness studies and, second, it approaches impoliteness with detailed anal-
yses drawing on different perspectives such as schema theory, relevance theory and rapport
management theory. All in all, this book is an engaging and valuable contribution to lin-
guistic politeness theory. Pragmaticians, social psychologists, corpus linguists, students of
English language learning, and many others will find this work stimulating and insightful.

Juan M Hernández-Campoy and Juan A Cutillas-Espinosa (eds), Style-shifting in Public: New

Perspectives on Stylistic Variation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, PA, 2012; vi + 231 pp.

Reviewed by: Maciej Czerwiński, Institute of Slavic Philology, Jagiellonian University,

Krakow, Poland

This volume offers a variety of exceptional examples of how linguistic communication

– here defined as styles – projects one’s identity in social reality. Some of these styles
are very subtle and at first glance implicit, while some are recognizable only by native
speakers or specialized scholars. Such a social constructivist approach to style-shifting
enables one to demonstrate the ideological and political performativity of the most
basic linguistic items at various levels – in this book, primarily at the phonetic level
and, to a lesser extent, at the level of genre. Such an orientation within the field of
sociolinguistics and stylistics is described as a transformation from the reactive
(responsive) model towards the proactive (initiative) model. Two more traditional
approaches, Attention to Speak (AS) and Audience Design (AD), are labelled in the
introduction as not sufficient, and are now being replaced by a more sophisticated
Speaker Design model in which the speakers are understood as ‘taking part in shaping
and re-shaping interactional norms and social structures, rather than simply accom-
modating to them’ (p. 4). The approach takes into account the question of how indi-
viduals position themselves within societal reality by and through linguistic use. From
this perspective, however, identity is not taken as static, but as dynamic and variable;
any speech use, thus, has a performative nature ‘with speakers projecting different
roles also in different circumstances, since we are always displaying some particular
type of identity’ (p. 4).
What makes the approach in question important for Critical Discourse Studies (CDS)
is its interest in the link between ideology and language, although the very term dis-
course appears quite rarely (moreover, there is no entry for discourse in the index).
Furthermore, the constructivist approach to style, as in discourse analysis, takes into
consideration several settings such as context, speaker’s agency, social meanings (i.e.
attitudes, beliefs, stereotypes), interactional level, practice, and so on. Roughly speaking,

Downloaded from das.sagepub.com at UNIVERSIDAD DE ANTIOQUIA on November 3, 2014