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Impoliteness: Questions and answers Jonathan Culpeper Lancaster University, UK
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1. What does this paper cover? I have been researching impoliteness for over 20 years. During this time, I have forayed into various issues and explored a range of data. Along the way, my understanding of impoliteness has developed. This paper is a retrospective, reflecting on some key questi...

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  • August 3, 2024
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The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness: Questions and answers. In: Denis Jamet and Manuel Jobert
(eds.) Aspects of Impoliteness. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2-15. It may contain minor errors and infelicities.


Impoliteness: Questions and answers
Jonathan Culpeper
Lancaster University, UK


1. What does this paper cover?
I have been researching impoliteness for over 20 years. During this time, I have forayed into
various issues and explored a range of data. Along the way, my understanding of impoliteness
has developed. This paper is a retrospective, reflecting on some key questions that have emerged
and supplying possible answers. Fuller descriptions of many phenomena discussed can be found
in Culpeper (2011).
In the remainder of this paper I will address the following questions: Why bother to study
impoliteness? What is impoliteness? Is impoliteness the best label for “it”, and what do the
possible labels tell us about “it”? What are the most frequent linguistic ways in which somebody
causes impoliteness? Is it the case that impoliteness is not creative? Is it the case that the British
are now more impolite than they were? Is it the case that some people are predisposed towards
being impolite?

2. Why bother to study impoliteness?
I conduct research in a number of different areas, including the language of Shakespeare. The
different reactions I get from non-academics (and even sometimes academics) when I announce
that my research is the language of Shakespeare compared with impoliteness is striking.
Impoliteness is considered the nasty marginal stuff on the fringes of language and indeed society.
There is little to understand or investigate because it is so simplistic. Hence, reactions are rather
muted expressions of puzzlement about why anybody would want to research impoliteness.
In fact, there are several strong reasons why research is necessary. Impoliteness is
socially important. It is highly salient in public life (much more so than politeness). Public signs,
charters, laws and so on try to prohibit it. It is also much talked about (in 2006 the best-selling
author Lynne Truss published Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life). It
can be highly damaging to personal lives. A saying in the UK, often delivered by parents to
children, runs: “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”. Research
suggests this is not always true (e.g. Burman et al. 2002; Greenwell and Dengerink 1973, 70).
Impoliteness is – or at least should be – of interest to linguistics research. From a descriptive
point of view, impoliteness plays a central role in many discourses (from military recruit training
to exploitative TV shows), yet those discourses are rarely described in detail. From are a
theoretical point of view, many theories, notably in pragmatics and interactional sociolinguistics,
are biased towards, and developed from, socially cooperative interactions – thus, they cannot
adequately explain anti-social interactions. From a methodological point of view, traditional
pragmatics research methods (e.g. discourse completion tasks, role play) are likely to be flawed,
because informants may well not perform in a natural way when they know that repugnant
behaviour is being recorded. There are also important spin-offs for other disciplines, including
social psychology (especially related to verbal aggression), sociology (especially related to
verbal abuse), conflict studies (e.g. resolution of verbal conflict) and media studies (e.g.
exploitative TV).


1

, The pre-final version of: Culpeper, Jonathan (2013) Impoliteness: Questions and answers. In: Denis Jamet and Manuel Jobert
(eds.) Aspects of Impoliteness. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2-15. It may contain minor errors and infelicities.

3. What is impoliteness?
If this question was easy to answer, I would not have spent the time I have researching
impoliteness. The somewhat elusive nature of impoliteness is one of the things that makes it
interesting. Let us begin with an example. This is a diary-type report produced by one of my
students:

I was in a taxi with 5 other girls, on our way into town. The taxi driver seemed nice at first,
commenting on how pretty we looked etc. Then he turned quite nasty, making vulgar
sexual innuendos, swearing a lot and laughing at us. He then insulted some of us,
commenting on the clothes we were wearing and when we didn’t laugh, he looked quite
angry. He then asked where we were from, we told him, and then he started criticising and
insulting us and our home towns. We mostly stayed quiet, giving non-committal, single
word answers until we could leave.

I used this particular example to open my 2011 book on impoliteness precisely because it
contains many impoliteness-related features. Note the specific kinds of communicative
behaviour reported to be produced by the taxi driver: “commenting”, “innuendos”, “swearing”,
“laughing”, “insulted”, “criticising”, plus various non-verbal aspects, “he looked quite angry”;
“his tone of voice and facial expressions also made us feel very uncomfortable”. Each one of
these kinds of communicative behaviour are worthy of investigation in their own right. But how
do I know that such behaviour has anything to do with impoliteness? I asked my student
reporters to reflect on their diary reports immediately after they wrote them (needless to say, so
as not to bias the data, they were not told that I was interested in impoliteness). This student
described the taxi driver’s behaviour as “sexist, rude, very offensive and inappropriate given the
context”. We will discuss the labelling of impoliteness in more detail later, but here note that two
labels, “sexist” and “rude”, are metapragmatic labels for impoliteness, especially so in the case
of “rude”. So, what we have in this diary reflection is some evidence that one of the actual
targets of the communicative behaviour took it as impolite.
More recently, I have used this particular example in presentations and discussed it with
various audiences. It was suggested to me that this might not be a case of “genuine impoliteness”
at all, but of “failed banter” on the part of the taxi driver. The notion of “pragmatic failure” was
put forward by Thomas (1983). In essence, it concerns the failure to convey the right pragmatic
meaning. Thomas was particularly concerned with pragmatic failure in cross-cultural
communicative situations, where one participant might have different understandings of
pragmatic resources and the situations in which they are used from other participants. There is
indeed a cross-cultural dimension to this interaction: the taxi driver is highly likely to be a local,
born and bred Lancastrian, whereas the passengers are students from other parts of the UK.
Cultures, of course, do not simply correlate with nation-states. Within any nation, there is much
cultural variability. Whilst I cannot find any research proving the prevalence of banter in
northern England, it is certainly generally assumed to be the case (compare the many hits for
“Northern banter” in Google, compared with the very few for “Southern banter”). It is plausible
that at least initially the taxi driver was attempting banter. Note that some support for this is in
the fact that things turn nastier “when we didn’t laugh”. Sharing laughter is consistent with doing
banter, not genuine impoliteness. The implications of not joining in banter or at least reacting
positively (e.g. laughing, smiling) are that it could be taken as a rebuff. Banter is a way of

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