Why impolite

Politeness, impoliteness; other-politeness, self-politeness

Authors

  • Rong Chen Dalian University of Foreign Languages/California State University, San Bernardino

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.22026

Keywords:

politeness, impoliteness, other-politeness, self-politeness, face, other-face, self-face

Abstract

Impoliteness has thrust itself onto the centre stage of politeness research as well as the general area of pragmatics. Attention has been given, in recent decades, to various aspects of impoliteness: how it is linguistically and pragmatically realised, in what speech situations it is found, and by whom it is (or should be) evaluated. However, there has not been much explicit discussion in the literature on why speakers would choose to be impolite, although the functions of specific instances of impoliteness are frequently discussed. In this paper, I propose that impoliteness is largely motivated by self-politeness.

Author Biography

  • Rong Chen, Dalian University of Foreign Languages/California State University, San Bernardino

    Rong Chen is guest professor at Dalian University of Foreign Languages, China and professor emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino, US. He has published several books and dozens of articles in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, including Toward a Motivation Model of Pragmatics (De Gruyter Mouton, 2022).

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Published

2022-10-24

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Chen, R. (2022). Why impolite: Politeness, impoliteness; other-politeness, self-politeness. East Asian Pragmatics, 8(1), 7–32. https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.22026