The year 2008 could be referred to as “the Year of Impoliteness.” The appearance of a book (Bousfield, Impoliteness in interaction), the present edited volume, and two special journal issues (Journal of Politeness Research 4.2 and Pragmatics 18.4) cannot be a mere coincidence. Such proliferation is the bumper harvest of pleas by many scholars that the study of impoliteness deserves attention.
The emphasis of earlier politeness work on isolated utterances and on cooperative, harmonious interaction has been criticized not least because context and conflictive and impolite behavior were ignored, the latter simply seen as the absence of politeness. Early isolated attempts to explore this kind of “aberrant” behavior remained in the minority. However, suggested modifications and expansions of Brown & Levinson’s (1978 [Reference Brown and Levinson1987]) theory offered fertile ground for integrating the study of impoliteness into the study of interpersonal interaction. This development, coupled with the more radical discursive or postmodern turn to politeness research, contributed to the rapid recent expansion of research on impoliteness.
The present volume includes a comprehensive Introduction by the editors and eleven original chapters divided into five sections on the basis of the thematic areas of the data analyzed. All the studies explore how impoliteness is enacted and investigate its relationship to power, mostly merging insights provided by the post-Brown & Levinson era and the discursive turn. The complexity of the notion of power is attested in the absence of a unified definition, as is the case with impoliteness and rudeness. Authors draw from various sources to explore the multifaceted notion of impoliteness in longer stretches of discourse in specific institutional settings and concur only insofar as it is seen as a highly dynamic and negotiable rather than a static attribute of speakers. They subscribe to its situatedness and, explicitly or implicitly, see impoliteness as relationally emergent in interaction. Further, impoliteness is mostly seen as an exercise of power even when used by less powerful interlocutors. The data investigated include political (Maria Dolores Garcia-Pastor; Miriam Locher, & Richard Watts), workplace (Stephanie Schnurr, Meredith Mara, & Janet Holmes; Louise Mullany) and historical courtroom (Dawn Elizabeth Archer) interactions. Even though one might have wished analyses of more informal, mundane interactions, where politeness and impoliteness may intermingle, it is understandable that the contexts selected offer better sites for a fuller exploration of the relationship between impoliteness and power.
Section I includes two theoretically oriented chapters. Jonathan Culpeper, in his most interesting “Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power,” builds on his well-known earlier work and merges it critically with relational work and issues of power in contexts involving mainly “sanctioned aggressive facework”. He attempts to provide the missing distinction among impoliteness, rudeness, and overpoliteness, which he locates in the presence or absence of intention. For him, impoliteness is intentional, whereas rudeness is unintentional. Similarly, in “Toward a unified theory of politeness, impoliteness, and rudeness,” Marina Terkourafi draws on her frame-based approach to politeness to provide an original, all-encompassing framework, based on the contested notion of face. Her chapter is exceptional in that it is a purely theoretical endeavor offering a five-category distinction: marked and unmarked politeness, marked and unmarked rudeness, and impoliteness. In contrast to Culpeper, Terkourafi suggests that impoliteness is unintentional, whereas rudeness is intentional. Considerations of power enter the scene in the process of constituting or threatening face.
Section II includes two chapters dealing with political interaction. In “Relational work and impoliteness: Negotiating norms of linguistic behaviour,” Locher & Watts further their highly influential exploration of relational work, introducing the concept of frames of expectation to account for appropriate behavior, both positively and negatively marked. They concentrate on the latter. They view impoliteness as a first-order concept that takes into account laypeople’s assessments that are based on individuals’ negotiable norms and expectations. On the basis of an intriguing analysis of a political interview, they argue that power, like impoliteness, is discursively negotiated and latently present in every social interaction. Garcia-Pastor, in “Political campaign debates as zero-sum games: Impoliteness and power in candidates’ exchanges,” explores the relationship between power and impoliteness in electoral debates. She introduces the notion of “negativity cycles” (chains of positive and negative face-aggravating moves) in which contenders exhibit hostility against each other in an attempt to discredit the opponent and exert power over him or her. This gives rise to a discursive struggle that testifies to the link between power and impoliteness and underlines the relational, dynamic, and contestable nature of these notions.
Section III includes three chapters dealing with interactions with legally constituted authorities. Derek Bousfield, in “Impoliteness in the struggle for power,” explores the interface between impoliteness and power, viewing the latter as an issue in every interaction. He moves on the impoliteness debate by proposing a model of two basic tactics, on-record and off-record impoliteness, on the basis of media data. He then links impoliteness with the exercise or challenge of power, since successful impoliteness creates and/or activates power, challenges it, or combines these actions. In “Threats in conflict talk: Impoliteness and manipulation,” Holger Limberg investigates verbal threats and their relationship to power in media police–citizen interactions. He sees threats as powerful institutionally sanctioned devices when performed by policemen, and thus not impolite unless they deviate from the institutional code, but face-threatening since they restrict the offender’s action environment and manipulate him or her on both a linguistic and a nonlinguistic level. When threats are performed by offenders, they are seen as inappropriate. In “Verbal aggression and impoliteness: Related or synonymous?” Archer attempts to draw a distinction between verbal aggression and impoliteness and sees the latter as a subcategory of the former, which is also the playground of the exercise of power. To tease out the differences between the two, she uses Goffman’s face-damaging categories to account for the specifics of a rare source, that of historical courtroom data, where impoliteness is rather uncommon.
Section IV includes two papers dealing with workplace interaction. In “Impoliteness as a means of contesting power relations in the workplace,” Schnurr, Marra & Holmes argue for the importance of context and uptake in analyzing and classifying moves as polite, impolite, or politic. On the basis of natural workplace data, they show how power and politeness are intricately linked. The frequent use of impoliteness by powerful interlocutors to subordinates is perceived as politic behavior, whereas in the few cases that subordinates use impoliteness, it is interpreted as an attempt at subverting existing power relationships. This is manifested through two kinds of strategies: (a) moves that appear polite or politic but have an impolite message, and (b) moves that appear impolite but are politic in the specific community of practice. Mullany, in “‘Stop hassling me!’: Impoliteness, power and gender identity in the professional workplace,” explores how impoliteness and power interact with gender in business meetings and argues that they are all enacted within business discourse. Through her analysis of specific examples, she clarifies how women use impoliteness in the struggle for power. However, since this is a stereotypically male pattern of interaction, females attract negative evaluations. Drawing largely on postmodern theories, she argues for the integration of the Community of Practice (CofP) model along with certain aspects of other impoliteness approaches.
The last section, V, includes two studies. In “‘You’re screwed either way’: An exploration of code-switching, impoliteness and power,” Holly Cashman explores the complex relationship between impoliteness and power in less-studied bilingual contexts. She uses the contested instrument of interview data to complement natural and questionnaire data and integrates aspects of various approaches to politeness and impoliteness to analyze it. Cashman sees codeswitching as a means of exercising power and an important aspect of relational work. She contends that interlocutors recognize and use it as a possible resource for acting politely or impolitely and as a cue for interpreting others’ behavior. Finally, Sage Lambert Graham, in “A manual for (im)politeness?: The impact of the FAQ in an electronic community of practice,” explores perceptions of appropriateness and politeness in the messages sent to an e-mail discussion list. She advocates the importance of recognizing the particularities of the medium and concentrating on a specific CofP. She draws on the guidelines in FAQs insightfully and argues that, though valuable, they are contradictory, thus placing newcomers into a difficult position and setting up the potential for conflict.
All in all, the contributions in this volume are thought-provoking. They present a well-rounded picture of the research on (im)politeness that has been done so far, move it forward in various directions, and provide ideas for further research. Despite minor objections one might have to specific points made, the chapters are a valuable addition to the existing literature in terms of both theory construction and rich empirical analysis. What is noteworthy in this volume is that the authors build on, modify, expand on, and even challenge one another’s positions, using ample cross-referencing, participating in this way in a “discursive struggle” at a different level. The editors must be credited for an impressive volume that takes on board all current concerns of impoliteness researchers working within more socially oriented theoretical frameworks.
