Kwara State University, Malete

Name: Muhyideen Kolawole Ayuba

Matric Number: 23/27MEL/009

Topic: (Im)politeness

Course Code: ENG835

Course Tittle: Pragmatics

Lecturer: Dr. Tomi Adeoti

March, 2024

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1.0 Introduction
As well noted by Muhammad and Abbas (2015), the concept of (im)politeness became easy
for linguists to explore through the model of politeness of Brown and Levinson (1987). They
further explained, after a careful review of scholars' works, that the concept of (im)politeness
came into being due to the mismatch that happened among linguists in unfolding the
linguistic realities behind the concept "politeness". However, Culpeper's works (2005, 2011,
2015, 2017) helped in clarifying the scope of the concept which stemmed from his extensive
works on Brown and Levinson's model of politeness. Culpeper, after many works on
politeness, also introduced his theory of impoliteness which he regards as 'parasite of
politeness'.

In 2011, reviewing Brown and Levinson, Culpeper praised Brown and Levinson works on
politeness as pioneers of the work on the concept which later became a subject of interest to
many linguists and metamorphosed into an independent separate journal. In addition, the
study of politeness has also influenced the widespread use of pragmatics. At the moment,
politeness has become an area of study that is widely applied to diverse disciplines of
knowledge (Culpeper, 2011). So salient?! Let's see it in context.

The use of third person personal pronouns among Yoruba speakers in Nigeria could be an
interesting scenario to illustrate how politeness works. A Yoruba speaker would be regarded
polite when he uses 'ẹ' to address an older fellow and not 'o' or elimination of the pronoun in
an instance like, "Ẹ ran mi lọwọ" (Help me); "Ran mi lọwọ" (Help me). Like the magic word
'sorry' in English or the fronting of a noun before the pronoun referencing the speaker, "I" in
"Bola and I went to school" to show politeness, Yoruba has its elements of politeness as well.
However, the use of 'ẹ' can also be tricky like 'sorry' in a wrong context (linguistic or
physical). Besides, do we say any Hausa that does not use 'ẹ' is impolite? No! Culpeper
(2011) pointed out that there are other elements of politeness in such a language/dialect too,
not necessarily 'ẹ' in Yoruba for instance, as it is the case in the use of 'sorry' in British and
North American English. From a perspective, Culpeper viewed (im)politeness as a cultural-
specific phenomenon that is "in the eyes and ears of the beholder".

1.1 Politeness as a Concept

Against this backdrop, a need calls for the definition of politeness which Culpeper (2011)
believed is one of the most contentious issues in pragmatics and that has affected the unified

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understanding of the concept. Notwithstanding, some definitions shall be examined for the
purpose of this study.

According to Leech (1983, p. 82) quoted in Culpeper (2011):

[The role of the Politeness Principle is] to maintain the social equilibrium and the friendly
relations which enable us to assume that our interlocutors are being cooperative in the first
place.

Politeness can be defined as a means of minimizing confrontation in discourse - both the

possibility of confrontation occurring at all, and the possibility that a confrontation will be
perceived as threatening (R. Lakoff 1989, p.102 in Culpeper, 2011).

These definitions, as noticed, rely on a pragmatic view of politeness whereby politeness

principles are applied to attain social stability and good interpersonal relationships.
Consequently, this is what Watts (2003) refers to as second-order politeness.

Unlike the above definitions, another approach was employed to define politeness which is
first-order politeness. This view appreciates politeness from the user's point of view and not
from the researcher's perception.

We take first-order politeness to correspond to the various ways in which polite behaviour is
perceived and talked about by members of socio-cultural groups. It encompasses, in other
words, commonsense notions of politeness. Second-order politeness, on the other hand, is a
theoretical construct, a term within a theory of social behaviour and language usage (Watts et
al. 2005, p. 3).

1.2 Politeness Principle

The Politeness Principle is a theory that appeared within the framework of pragmatic
approach in linguistics. According to this theory the interlocutors use particular strategies in
order to achieve successful communication. These strategies enable to create a maximally
comfortable environment for communication.

The politeness theory posits that individuals in any culture have positive and negative face
wants. But many daily interaction behaviors intrinsically threaten face. The degree to which

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an act is face threatening is affected by the social factors of power, distance, and rank of
imposition. People therefore use politeness strategies to reduce face threats. Politeness theory
has particular implications for interpersonal communication research: It helps address why
people say what they do when performing actions such as making requests or giving advice
and it has implications for identity management and personal relationships. The theory also
has spurred ongoing debate about what elements of politeness are culturally specific versus
universal.

Politeness is defined as using communicative strategies to create and maintain social

harmony. [2] This can be done in various ways:
1) Being contextually appropriate.
2) Following social and cultural norms.
3) Being socially positive by addressing face needs.

Politeness superstrategies are determined by contextual factors:

 Power relations between speaker and listener
 Social distance between speaker and listener
 How great the threat of the face threatening act is.

1.3 Politeness Strategies

In order to save face, people have the option to use politeness superstrategies with FTAs
(Face Threatening Acts). Depending upon the speaker’s cognitive assessment of the
previously mentioned interpersonal variables, various strategies can be employed to save and
promote one’s public self-image (i.e., face). Brown and Levinson (1987) delineated four
major categories of these strategies in the following way. [Requestive speech acts are added
for illustration.]:

 Bald on record; this is not attempting to minimise the face threat. Example: "Open
the door! It’s hot"
 Positive politeness; this is showing you value someone so minimising the threat to
the positive face. Example: "Jake honey, will you open the window? Thanks"

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  Negative politeness; this is not impeding on someone so minimising the threat to the
negative face. Example: “Jacob, er... I’m sorry to bother you, but could you possibly
open the window? It’s awfully hot in here.”
 Off record; this is avoiding responsibility for the FTA often by being indirect.
Example: “It’s hot in here.”

2.0 Politeness and Impoliteness: Antonymy Relation?

A quick review of Culpeper (2011) revealed that the two concepts are not completely
diametric opposite. As he rightly pointed, there is a level in-between that cannot be
overlooked. He further expatiated this with cases of anger, lexical euphemism, taboo, sarcasm
and the availability of conventionalised impolite formulae. The use of taboo language in
Nigeria for instance, if labeled impolite, might prove the researcher wrong due to its
contextual use. A friend could address his friend, "you bastard" which is linguistically
considered impolite but in return attracts a smile or even a response like, "I love you too" due
to the context. Building on this, let's examine what is impoliteness.

2.1 Impoliteness: A Critical Examination

Culpeper (2001) provided a framework based on Spencer-Oatey’s (2000) notion of Rapport
Management with which researchers can analyze impoliteness events in terms of face
management as well as sociality rights. Rapport Management asserted that politeness and,
later, impoliteness, are not based solely on the preservation of an individual’s self-image (i.e.,
their positive or negative face [Brown & Levinson, 1987]), but rather their association with
others and their roles in the community play roles as well. This framework comprised Quality
face, Social Identity face, Relational face, Equity rights, and Association rights. Culpeper
adds taboo words and topics as other possible indicators of impoliteness that do not fit into
these five categories.

He applies this framework to cross-cultural data from England, Germany, Turkey, Finland,
and China to observe cultural differences in impoliteness events. He finds that Quality face
attacks are the most prevalent in the majority of these cultures except the German and
Chinese data. Overall, Quality face attacks and violations of Equity and Association rights
were the most popular offenses cross-culturally. However, Relation face attacks are
considered more impolite in the German and Chinese data than in the other observed cultures.

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Interestingly, Social identity face attacks and taboo words were considered more impolite in
the English data than in the other cultures.

To this end, Culpeper 2011, p.5) provided this definition for 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 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 offend.
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.

Impoliteness, communicative strategies designed to attack face, and thereby cause social
conflict and disharmony [...] (Culpeper et al. 2003, p. 1546).

Impoliteness comes about when: (1) the speaker communicates face-attack intentionally, or
(2) the hearer perceives and/or constructs behaviour as intentionally face-attacking, or a
combination of (1) and (2). (Culpeper 2005, p. 38)

Lastly on Culpeper, with a slight adjustment on his 2011 definition of impoliteness, Culpeper
and Tantucci (2021, p. 3) said:

(Im)politeness is an evaluative attitude, ranging on a positive-negative continuum, towards

specific in-context-behaviours. Such behaviours are viewed positively considered “polite”?
When they are in accord with how one wants them to be, how one expects them to be and/or
how one thinks they ought to be. The converse is the case for behaviours considered
“impolite”.

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Other definitions of impoliteness are:

Impoliteness occurs when the expression used is not conventionalised relative to the context
of occurrence; it threatens the addressee's face [...] but no face-threatening intention is
attributed to the speaker by the hearer. (Terkourafi 2008, p. 70)

[...] impoliteness constitutes the communication of intentionally gratuitous and conflictive

verbal face-threatening acts (FTAs) which are purposefully delivered: (1) unmitigated, in
contexts where mitigation is required, and/or, (2) with deliberate aggression, that is, with the
face threat exacerbated, 'boosted', or maximised in some way to heighten the face damage
inflicted. (Bousfield 2008, p. 72)

[...] 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 context and among particular interlocutors, whether intentionally or not" (Holmes
et al 2008, p. 196)

Rudeness is a kind of prototypically non-cooperative or competitive communicative

behaviour which destabilises the personal relationships of the interacting individuals [...]
creates all maintains an emotional atmosphere of mutual reverence and antipathy, which
primarily serves egocentric interests [...] (Kienpointner 2008)

2.2 Operationalizing Degree of Impoliteness

According to Culpeper (2011, p. 254), the degree of impoliteness can be operationalized by
the following factors:

2.2.1 Attitudinal factors

• Which (and the extent to which) expectations, desires and/or beliefs infringed are
cognitively active;
• The emotional sensitivity of the expectations, desires and/or beliefs infringed;

2.2.2 Linguistic-pragmatic factors

• The degree of offense conventionally associated with any linguistic formula used;

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• The amount and kind of intensifying linguistic work undertaken (the choice of intense lexis,
the addition of taboo words or intensifiers, prosodic reinforcement, etc.);
• The amount of inferential work required to understand the behaviours in context;
• The way in which and the extent to which the behavior matches or mismatches: (1) the
other parts of the multimodal behavior, or (2) the context;

2.2.3 Contextual and co-textual factors

• The extent to which the behavior is positively or negatively valued in the relevant culture;
• The extent to which face or sociality rights are exposed;
• The extent to which power structures are abused;
• The extent to which the behavior is legitimised;
• Whether the behavior is in-group or out-group;
• The (im)politeness threshold set, in particular, by the co-text;
• The degree of intentionality ascribed to the actor(s);
• The kind of person the communicator is understood to be’ and
• The perspective of the person taking offense

A symptom of offense being taken is a negative emotional reaction in, particularly, any target
of the behavior, whether the symptom is articulated verbally or non-verbally. An impoliteness
attitude may be referred to (and also partly shaped) by particular impoliteness-related labels
(e.g. impolite, rude, discourteous, ill-mannered, aggressive), which collectively constitute an
impoliteness metalanguage embedded in impoliteness metadiscourse. Each label refers to a
slightly different domain of impoliteness, domains which vary according to degree of
symbolic violence and the in-group/out-group dimension.

2.3 Impoliteness Strategies

In 2016, Culpeper realised that the concept of strategy was poorly defined and not adequately
understood. Consequently, he redefined it, reviewed his 1996 taxonomies of impoliteness and
resolved controversial issues on impoliteness Strategies and context as well as the degree of
offense caused. Finally, he introduced another framework of impoliteness strategies. Without
much ado, according to Culpeper (2016), strategy, being a word from the ancient Greece that
has a sense to have a plan to achieve certain military objectives, it means ways by which a set
of goals in interaction which are conventional for a speech community.

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The impoliteness strategies proposed in Culpeper (1996: 356-7, and slightly revised in 2005),
which to an extent mirror the politeness strategies of Brown and Levinson (1987), are as
follows:

2.3.1 Bald on record impoliteness: This strategy is employed when there is much face at
risk and when a speaker intends to damage the hearer's face and thus the impolite utterance
will be performed directly and clearly (Bousfield, 2008, p. 92). Culpeper uses here the
concept of face-attack-act (FAA), in opposition to FTA, in order to identify the face attack
where there is a deliberate intention on the part of the speaker (Mullany and Stockwell, 2010,
p. 71). Wieczorek (2013, p. 46) elucidates the difference between Brown and Levinson's bald
on record politeness and Culpeper's bald on record impoliteness. While the former is applied
in particular situations where the risk to face is minimal without any attention to attack the
hearer's face, the latter is used when there is much risk to the face and the speaker intends to
damage the other's face.

2.3.2 Positive impoliteness: This strategy is used to damage the hearer's positive face (his
desire to be accepted) (Bousfield and Locher, 2008, 134). In the incarnation of his model
(2005), Culpeper adds a range of sub-strategies to positive impoliteness including (cited in
Mullany and Stockwell, 2010, p. 72): - ignoring or snubbing the other - denying common
ground with the hearer - selecting a sensitive or undesirable topic to talk about - using
inappropriate identity markers - being disinterested and unsympathetic with the hearer -
looking for disagreements -using obscure language and inserting secretive words within the
discourse -using taboo words

2.3.3 Negative impoliteness: This strategy is designed to attack the hearer's negative face
(his desire to be free from imposition) (Thielemann and Kosta, 2013, p. 239). Negative
impoliteness, in accordance with Culpeper's (2005) incarnation, involves the following sub-
strategies (cited in Mullany and Stockwell, 2010, p. 72): - scorn - frighten - ridicule - And
invade the hearer's space literally or metaphorically

2.3.4 Sarcasm or mock impoliteness: In his strategy, the speaker performs the FTA using
politeness strategies which are clearly insincere (Thielemann and Kosta, 2013, p. 239). In
other words, sarcasm means the use of one or more sub-strategies which are superficially
suitable and accepted but deeply they have the opposite meaning (Bousfield, 2008, p. 95).

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2.3.5 Withhold politeness: This strategy occurs when the speaker does not perform
politeness where it is expected, as in keeping silent when the speaker is supposed to thank the
hearer (Thielemann and Kosta, 2013, p. 239).

3.0 Are the Impoliteness Strategies Valid?

The impoliteness output strategies outlined in Culpeper (1996) seem to have stood the test of
time, the same basic set having been applied in a number of studies. However, that does not
prove that they are routine, that they are strategies that are known within particular
communities.
Let's look at Catherine Rondina and Dan Workman's (2005) Rudeness: Deal with it if you
please, a serious manual. Two lists of "don'ts" are given (p.4 and p.19). They include non-
verbal behaviours such as burping. The more language-based ones are listed below, followed
by an impoliteness output strategy classification in square brackets:

 Insulting someone to their face. [Positive impoliteness: Call the other names]
 Embarrass or insult others. [Positive impoliteness: Make the other feel uncomfortable.
Call the other names]
 Avoiding or ignoring someone. [Positive impoliteness: Ignore, snub the other]
 Don't use crude language. [Positive impoliteness: Use taboo words]
 Talking back to your parents or teachers. [Negative impoliteness: Condescend, scorn
or ridicule]
 Interrupt when someone is speaking. [Negative impoliteness: Violate the structure of
conversation]
 Forgetting to say "please" or "thank you." [Withhold politeness]
Culpeper explained though that this manual is designed for the North American context.
However, even from the British cultural perspective, one have no difficulty at all in
recognising these “rules”. What emerges, then, maps quite well onto the set of impoliteness
strategies outlined above. It's important to note that, the superstrategies have proved far more
problematic (identifying clear, mutually exclusive examples has been particularly
challenging).

3.1 Directness and Impoliteness

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In Brown and Levinson’s framework (1987), the superstrategies are not only ordered
according to directness (bald on record being most direct), but also associated with different
degrees of face threat, such that Bald-on-record is selected when face threat is small and
Don’t do the FTA when it is large.

From a theoretical point of view, one can point to two contradictory hypotheses. From Brown
and Levinson (1987), we could hypothesise that the more directly the impoliteness is
triggered the more offence is taken (e.g. "Leave" is predicted to be more offensive than
"would you mind leaving?"). From Leech (1983: 108), we could hypothesize the opposite.
This may sound implausible, but Leech is talking about the expression of impolite beliefs. To
illustrate, the Republican presidential candidate John McCain responded to his wife when she
teased him about his thinning hair in front of reporters: "At least I don’t plaster on make-up
like a trollop, you cunt" (The Week 12/07/08). The utterance "At least I don’t plaster on
make-up like a trollop" flouts the Maxim of Relation: it is not the most relevant way of
putting it (compare with the more direct "you plaster make-up on like a trollop"). But the
inference that it is she who plasters on make-up like a trollop can clearly be drawn.

Which hypothesis is right? There are two studies worth mentioning; neither are conclusive,
but both suggest that things are more complex. The study reported in Culpeper (2011:
Chapter 5) suggests that impoliteness that is relatively direct and impoliteness that is
relatively indirect were both inclined to produce more offense. Viejobueno et al. (2008; this is
largely based on Viejobueno, 2005) also reveals a similarly mixed picture, and, moreover,
points to differences depending on whether the relationship between participants is close or
distant.
Other issues on impoliteness like the Bottom-up Model of Impoliteness Triggers discussed by
Culpeper (2016) is also essential.

4.0 Conclusion
Impoliteness has been extensively discussed by scholars over time and is still relevant due to
its relative interest in human interaction and interpersonal relationships among humans. As
one of the major contributors to this aspect of pragmatics, Culpeper provides an extensive
insight into how impoliteness works, strategies and solutions to problems encountered in its
study. In this study, the concept of politeness and impoliteness has been intensively

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discussed, their strategies and relevant illustrations to display how they operate in the socio-
cultural domain.
References
B. V. Bousfield, D. (2008). Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam, AMS: John Benjaimins
B. V.
Brown & Levinson's face (2007). How it can − and can't − help us to understand interaction
across cultures. Intercultural Pragmatics 4(4): 463-492.
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C., (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, J. (2001). Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and Other Texts. New
York, NY: Pearson Education Limited
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using Language to cause Offence. Cambridge, CBG:
Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, J., (1996). Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics. 25 (3). pp.
349-367.
Culpeper, J., (2009). Impoliteness: Using and Understanding the Language of Offence.
Project Website: Linguistic Impoliteness
Leech, G. (2014). The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford, OXF: Oxford University Press.
Ruhi, Ş. & Aksan, Y. (Eds.). (2015). Exploring (Im)politeness in Specialized and General
Corpora: Converging Methodologies and Analytic Procedures. Newcastle, NEWC:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Watts, R., Ide, S. & Ehlich, K. (Eds.). (2005). Politeness in Language:Studies in its History,
Theory, and Practice. (2 ed.). Berlin, BL: Walter de Gruyter.

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