Conventionalised impoliteness formulae

Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 3232–3245

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Conventionalised impoliteness formulae§ Jonathan Culpeper * Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 18 February 2009 Received in revised form 13 May 2010 Accepted 18 May 2010

This paper makes a contribution to the study of impoliteness. More particularly, it explores conventionalised impoliteness formulae and their basis. It taps into debates about whether impoliteness (or politeness, for that matter) can be inherent in expressions, and argues that there is a sense in which it can. An important foundation for this paper is Terkourafi’s (e.g. 2001, 2002) work on formulaic politeness expressions. However, it argues that Terkourafi’s strong focus on the frequency of people’s direct experience of linguistic expressions in specific contexts, whilst appropriate for politeness, does not entirely suit an account of conventionalised impoliteness formulae. Indirect experience of impoliteness, especially via metadiscourse, does much to shape what counts as impolite and thus what may be conventionalised as impolite. Such impoliteness metadiscourse is driven not only by the salience of impoliteness, but by the social dynamics of impoliteness itself. Finally, this paper proposes two methods for identifying conventionalised impoliteness formulae (one being akin to Terkourafi’s method), and offers a preliminary list of such formulae in English. ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Conventionalisation Contextualization cues Formulae Impoliteness Metadiscourse Politeness Social norms

1. Introduction Goffman (1967:89) discusses ‘‘ritual affronts’’ or ‘‘profanations’’ performed by patients in psychiatric wards, varying from hurling abuse to hurling faeces, and notes that these acts are, ‘‘from the point of view of society at large and its ceremonial idiom’’, ‘‘calculated to convey complete disrespect and contempt through symbolic means’’. This paper focusses on the symbolic linguistic means for conveying impoliteness. Despite some early brief attempts, notably Lachenicht (1980), it is only in recent years that there has been a concerted effort to explore the language of social interactions which might be labelled ‘‘impolite’’ or ‘‘rude’’ (e.g. Mills, 2005; Culpeper et al., 2003; Culpeper, 2005; Bousfield, 2008; Bousfield and Locher, 2008). Some studies (e.g. Lachenicht, 1980; Culpeper, 1996) are closely modelled on the classic, and most cited, work on politeness, namely, Brown and Levinson (1987). Instead of containing a description of ‘‘pragmatic strategies’’ and ‘‘linguistic output strategies’’ for achieving politeness, they contain a description of ‘‘pragmatic strategies’’ and ‘‘linguistic output strategies’’ for achieving impoliteness. Such approaches have been much criticised by later politeness studies, notably Eelen (2001) and Watts (2003), for being too deterministic. It is not the case that any particular linguistic form guarantees an evaluation that it is impolite in all contexts; moreover, people may disagree about how impolite a linguistic form is. However, the current tendency to emphasize the context rather than linguistic form risks throwing the baby out with the bath-water. In fact, virtually no study has attempted to understand the nature of the relationship between linguistic forms

§ This paper was submitted and reviewed before I was invited to apply for the post of co-editor of this journal. All stages of the editorial process were undertaken by Jacob Mey. The contents of this paper will be expanded and further contextualised in Culpeper (forthcoming). * Tel.: +44 01524 592443; fax: +44 01524 843085. E-mail address: [email protected].

0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.05.007

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and politeness or impoliteness. The exception here is Terkourafi’s (e.g. 2001, 2002, 2005a,b) work on a frame-based approach to politeness, and this will provide the foundation for much of my own discussion of impoliteness. Section 2 will briefly outline what impoliteness might be. Section 3 discusses differing views on the proposition that impoliteness is inherent in linguistic expressions. Section 4 briefly examines the basis of conventionalised politeness formulae, whilst section 5 elaborates on the basis of conventionalised impoliteness formulae. Finally, section 6 proposes two methods for retrieving impoliteness formulae, and includes a list of English conventionalised impoliteness formulae arising from my data. 2. Impoliteness: what is it? Surveying a recent volume of papers on impoliteness, the editors conclude ‘‘there is no solid agreement in the chapters as to what ‘impoliteness’ actually is’’ (Locher and Bousfield, 2008:3). In fact, even the label itself is open to dispute, partly because there are many labels that relate to the notion of impoliteness, as this short list of English synonyms of the term impoliteness illustrates: bad manners, boldness, boorishness, brusqueness, coarseness, contempt, contumely, discourtesy, discourteousness, dishonor, disrespect, flippancy, hardihood, impertinence, impiety, impudence, incivility, inurbanity, inconsideration, insolence, insolency, insolentness, irreverence, lack of respect, profanation, rudeness, sacrilege, unmannerliness (http:// thesaurus.reference.com/) As Locher and Watts (2008:29) note, each of such terms evokes a particular kind of negative evaluation of behaviour. For example, rude may seem broad, but Culpeper (2009), examining its patterns of usage in the two-billion word Oxford English Corpus (henceforth, OEC), shows how it is characteristically used of behaviours which occur in public contexts, particularly public service contexts such as restaurants. Letting the actual meaning of any single label determine the underlying notion of impoliteness would lead to an exceedingly narrow focus of study. The reasons why I choose the term impoliteness to denote the underlying notion are: (a) that it provides an obvious counterpoint to the field of politeness studies, and (b) its extremely infrequent usage (a mere 30 instances of the noun appear in the OEC) makes it a good candidate for appropriation. I define the notion of impoliteness as follows: 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 group’s identities are mediated by others in interaction. Situated behaviours are viewed negatively 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 cause offence. 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.1 3. Is (im)politeness inherent in linguistic expressions? Although I am particularly interested in impoliteness, the arguments in this section apply equally to politeness. Papers which state a position on whether (im)politeness is inherent do not actually define what inherent meaning is. Moreover, the literature vacillates between talking about meanings inherent in speech acts and meanings inherent in forms, or, in Austinian (1962) terms, in illocutions and in locutions.2 As a preliminary in this section, I consider and reject the idea that (im)politeness is inherent in speech acts. Then, turning to the question posed in the title of this section, I first consider two opposed mono views, one arguing for a positive answer, the other a negative answer. Then I consider two variants of a dual view, arguing for both a positive and a negative answer. Brown and Levinson (1987:65–68) discuss ‘‘intrinsic FTAs’’. By face threatening acts, Brown and Levinson (1987:65) mean ‘‘what is intended to be done by a verbal or non-verbal communication, just as one or more ‘speech acts’ can be assigned to an utterance’’. What critiques of Brown and Levinson’s position neglect is that they talk about acts that ‘‘primarily’’ (1987:65, 67) or ‘‘mainly’’ (1987:68) perform face threat. In other words, the notion of inherent or, to use their term, intrinsic face threatening acts is fuzzy, not absolute. Thus, counter-examples such as orders which are beneficial to the hearer (e.g. ‘‘Tuck in!’’, said to encourage the guest to begin a delightful feast) are not a problem. Similarly, cases of banter do not challenge the basic claim; in fact, they can be taken as exceptions that prove the rule. However, there are still two problems. Firstly, what 1 Readers may note that this definition represents a departure from my earlier work (e.g. Culpeper, 1996, 2005; Culpeper et al., 2003). I made a decision in 2006 at the beginning of my ERSC-funded Fellowship on impoliteness to start afresh, viewing everything with a critical eye, including my own work. I do not completely reject my earlier definitions, but I do think they are excessively narrow, capturing just some aspects of prototypical impoliteness. For example, the idea that impoliteness has to be perceived as intentional (as opposed to accidental) for it to count as impoliteness was central to my previous definitions. Whilst prototypical impoliteness does involve the perception of behaviour designed to cause offence, my data showed that, on occasion, people took offence and described the behaviour as impolite or rude despite knowing that the producer had not acted intentionally. Hence, in the definition given in this paper impoliteness does not have intentionality as a necessary condition. 2 Some researchers refer to ‘‘linguistic behaviour’’ or ‘‘forms of behaviour’’ rather than ‘‘linguistic forms’’. The term ‘‘behaviour’’ is better able to accommodate non-verbal forms and non-contrastive aspects of language, and it has a closer relation with social action (see, for example, Verschureren, 1999:6–7). Nevertheless, in the publications cited in this paper, it still refers to a form—a relatively discrete oral or visual physical phenomenon which, together with other forms, encodes an aspect of meaning and constitutes a participant’s communicative repertoire.

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happens if there are so many exceptions that the exceptions become primary? Pertinent examples are provided in work on a variety of cultures. Take, for example, Nwoye’s (1992) exploration of the egalitarian Igbo society of Nigeria. He concludes that: very few actions are regarded as impositions. Requests, criticisms, thanks, and offers have been examined and have been found not to be generally considered as imposing. Rather, they are seen as a type of social insurance from which members of the group draw benefits by virtue of a reciprocal social contract according to which, for example, they can ask for (and get) a small quantity of salt when/if they run out of salt because they expect others to ask for (and obtain) it if they are in need. As speech acts, such requests are not in themselves inherently polite or impolite; rather, they are appropriate performances and attributes of good behavior inherent in good upbringing. (1992:327) Clearly, then, Brown and Levinson’s generalisation should have been made culture-specific (it would hold for stereotypical British culture, for instance). Secondly, meanings could only be inherent in speech acts if speech acts themselves had a degree of determinacy and stability. Unlike the form of an utterance, a speech act depends on a considerable amount of interpretive work in context. This point is neatly illustrated by Leech (1983:23–24): The indeterminacy of conversational utterances [. . .] shows itself in the NEGOTIABILITY of pragmatic factors; that is, by leaving the force unclear, S may leave H the opportunity to choose between one force and another, and thus leaves part of the responsibility of the meaning to H. For instance, ‘If I were you I’d leave town straight away’ can be interpreted according to the context as a piece of advice, a warning, or a threat. Here H, knowing something about S’s likely intentions, may interpret it as a threat, and act on it as such; but S will always be able to claim that it was a piece of advice, given from the friendliest of motives. Speech acts are a theoretical nonstarter for an argument that (im)politeness or face threat is inherent. In fact, Brown and Levinson themselves acknowledge this in their second edition: ‘‘speech act theory forces a sentence-based, speaker-oriented mode of analysis, requiring attribution of speech act categories where our own thesis requires that utterances are often equivocal in force’’ (1987:10). 3.1. Yes, impoliteness is inherent in linguistic expressions For the purposes of this section and in tune with the literature discussed within it, I will take a traditional view of inherent meaning that is, viewing it as formal semantic meaning which is more a matter of truth conditions than felicity conditions, more conventional than non-conventional, and more non-contextual (and thus non-relative) than contextual (such a view is espoused in, for example, the writings of Gottlob Frege). In Gricean terms, the focus is on what is said, which is ‘‘closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence)’’ uttered, along with their syntax (Grice, 1989:25; see also Grice, 1989:87), as opposed to what is implicated, whether conventionally or non-conventionally. Of course, the line between semantic meaning (encompassing what is sometimes referred to as encoded, literal or explicit meaning) and pragmatic meaning is highly controversial, and has been a topic of hot debate in recent years.3 One cannot find any mainstream politeness theorist explicitly arguing that either politeness or impoliteness is wholly inherent in linguistic expressions. However, the focus on linguistic expressions in earlier works may have given the impression that context was somehow less important. Furthermore, this impression has been articulated and perhaps hardened in the work of other scholars. Cruse (2000:362, original emphasis), for example, comments: Politeness is, first and foremost, a matter of what is said, and not a matter of what is thought or believed. Leech expresses the politeness principle thus: (I)

(II)

Minimise the expression of impolite beliefs. This is not an ideal formulation, as politeness does not essentially concern beliefs. However, it does have the merit of throwing the weight onto the expression. Let us rephrase the principle as follows: Choose expressions which minimally belittle the hearer’s status.

In fact, it is precisely Leech’s (1983) inclusion of the term ‘‘belief’’ that incorporates the perception of participants. In the absence of this, there is no explicit acknowledgement that the definition of politeness or impoliteness has anything to do with what participants mean and understand by an expression. Without this aspect, it is difficult to account for how the same expression can have different politeness values when perceived by different people, in different situations, cultures, and so on, or even how an apparently polite

3 To elaborate, at one end, semantic minimalists (e.g. Borg, 2004; Cappelen and Lepore, 2005) accord a limited role to pragmatic processes; at the other end, contextualists, notably Recanati (e.g. 2004), and relevance theorists (e.g. Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Carston, 2002) argue that minimal meanings are not possible—pragmatic processes determine even the truth conditions of utterances. In the light of arguments made by the latter scholars, the notion of ‘‘what is said’’ becomes problematic; a case is made for more pragmatic intrusion into what is said than Grice had envisaged.

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expression can be used for sarcasm. Of course, Alan Cruse is a semanticist, and so it is not surprising that he views politeness through the prism of semantics. We will see below that much scholarship has been taken up with refuting this position. However, as I will argue, I am not convinced that it necessarily follows that politeness or impoliteness lie entirely outside the scope of semantics. Given the fact that my definition of impoliteness in section 2 is pitched as an interpretative construct with various contextual factors playing a role, it would seem to be a foregone conclusion that impoliteness is not inherent in linguistic expressions. However, we should remember that my definition of inherent meaning articulated a traditional notion that even many semanticists would not recognise as tenable. Some traditional accounts of semantics, such as Kempson (1977), are indeed relatively restrictive. However, Kempson (e.g. 1977:8) is knowingly polemic in her restriction of semantics to a truth-based account and a theory of semantic competence. Other key works on semantics from the same period take a very different line. Leech ([1974] 1981:86) argues that a theory for ‘‘an ideal semantic description’’ ‘‘must also relate meaning to pragmatics – the way in which sentences are actually used and interpreted in speaker-hearer communication’’. Palmer argues that a restricted, non-contextual semantics, whilst justifiable on methodological grounds or as a terminological issue regarding the label semantics, should not be a form of semantics treated as ‘‘more central to the study of language’’ (1981 [1976]:50), because ‘‘only a small part of meaning will ever be captured’’ (1981:50), and ‘‘it is not possible to draw a clear theoretical division between what is in the world and what is in the language’’ (1981:51). 3.2. No, impoliteness is not inherent in linguistic expressions Given the fact that, as pointed out in the previous paragraphs, it is difficult to find mainstream supporters of the wholly inherent view, scholars who argue against politeness or impoliteness being inherent in linguistic expressions are shooting at a straw – or at least partially straw – target. The earliest and clearest exponent of this view is perhaps Bruce Fraser: [. . .] no sentence is inherently polite or impolite. We often take certain expressions to be impolite, but it is not the expressions themselves but the conditions under which they are used that determines the judgment of politeness. (Fraser and Nolan, 1981:96) Sentences are not ipso facto polite [. . .] (Fraser, 1990:233) More recent statements include the following: My aim will be to demonstrate that, at least in English, linguistic structures do not in themselves denote politeness, but rather that they lend themselves to individual interpretation as ‘‘polite’’ in instances of ongoing verbal interaction. (Watts, 2003:168) What is perceived to be (im)polite will thus ultimately rely on interactants’ assessments of social norms of appropriateness that have been previously acquired in the speech events in question [. . .]. As a result, I claim – with many others – that no utterance is inherently polite. (Locher, 2006:250–251) There is [. . .] no linguistic behaviour that is inherently polite or impolite. (Locher and Watts, 2008:78) Caution is needed here as there are different shades of strength in the ‘‘no’’ camp. Richard Watts, a major player in recent work on politeness, writes that expressions ‘‘lend themselves to individual interpretation’’ (2003:168, my emphasis), which suggests that they play some part in determining the interpretation of politeness, and indeed he describes in his book how some expressions constrain interpretation by virtue of the fact that they encode procedural meaning (Blakemore, 1987). Approaches to politeness that emphasise the role of context are sometimes referred to as ‘‘post-modern’’ or ‘‘discursive’’ (e.g. Eelen, 2001; Locher, 2006; Mills, 2003; Watts, 2003). As far as the label post-modern signals a concern with cultural and individual relativism and a dislike of universalising generalisations, it is accurate, but it brings some unwanted baggage with it, and so I will deploy the label discursive. The general focus of the discursive approach is on the micro, that is, on participants’ situated and dynamic evaluations of politeness, not shared conventionalised politeness forms or strategies. As an antidote to the overly form-focused and speaker-centred classic politeness theories (and, in the case of Brown and Levinson (1987), overly based on assumptions about politeness universals), discursive politeness work has been effective. However, one consequence of focusing on the dynamic and situated characteristics of politeness is that politeness is declared not to be a predictive theory (Watts, 2003:25), or even a post-hoc descriptive one (Watts, 2003:142). As Terkourafi comments (2005a:245), ‘‘[w]hat we are then left with are minute descriptions of individual encounters, but these do not in any way add up to an explanatory theory of the phenomena under study’’. Holmes (2005:115) even suggests that the analyst is redundant if we take the discursive line to its logical conclusion: ‘‘if everything is relative [. . .] the analyst cannot legitimately attribute meaning, one wonders what, then, does constitute a legitimate role for the analyst’’. However, there is a tendency in critical reactions to discursive approaches to target extreme, even somewhat caricatured, interpretations of them, whilst ignoring the totality of what they are saying. Discursive politeness approaches are not in fact fully discursive in the manner of, for example, the discursive approach in social psychology (e.g. Edwards and Potter, 1992) (see also Haugh’s 2007 critique, arguing that the discursive approach to politeness in incoherent). For example, Watts (e.g. 2003) and Locher (e.g. Locher, 2004; Locher and Watts, 2005) both embrace the notion of a (cognitive) ‘‘frame’’ (see section 5.2). By this, they account for how people make judgements about situations they have never before experienced: they draw on frame-based knowledge about situational norms and accompanying evaluations.

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Indeed, it is difficult to see how communication could proceed without some shared conventions of meaning. Both Lewis (1969), the seminal work on convention, and Clark (1996), a comprehensive treatment of interactional pragmatics, argue that such conventions enable participants to coordinate their thoughts and actions. In contrast, discursive studies downplay, partly for rhetorical reasons, shared conventions of meaning, instead emphasizing that meanings are very unstable, negotiable, and fuzzy and that communication is a very uncertain business. In fact, shared conventions of meaning mediated by multiple modalities, each of which may and often do act to reinforce each other, make for much more stability and certainty than one might expect from reading discursive studies. Archer and Akert (1980) conducted three extensive empirical tests, involving around 1000 informants and their unstructured comments on twenty thirty-second video-taped sequences of naturalistic face-to-face interaction. The tests exposed the informants to just a segment of the interaction, whether a temporal segment or a particular channel (a verbal transcript, transcript plus audio, etc.), after which they were asked interpretative questions concerning what was happening in the interaction. They found: (1) that most or even all pieces of an interaction can contain the information necessary for interpretation, and (2) that interpretations based on a very small piece of an interaction can be virtually as accurate as interpretations based on the whole interaction. (1980:413) They point out that perfect conditions for reception rarely obtain in real life, and yet ‘‘we frequently are able to interpret an act sequence of behaviour even if we have not observed it perfectly’’ (1980:414, original emphasis). Social interaction, they say, contains an ‘‘extraordinary degree of informational redundancy’’ (1980:414). They argue that their research shows that ‘‘people encode meaningful, appropriate behaviours into each of a bewildering number of pieces – some of them very small – of an interaction’’ (1980:415), and they do this unconsciously, as to do otherwise would be overwhelming. Archer and Akert (1980), of course, is not the only study to have investigated multi-modal redundancy. For example, Bavelas and Chovil (2000:186–187) report two studies which both suggest that redundancy is at least 60% (i.e. there is a 60% overlap between what non-verbal signals are conveying and what the words convey). Perhaps the most compelling evidence requiring us to re-think at least an extreme version of the discursive approach is intuitive—the commonplace fact that people have opinions about how different expressions relate to different degrees of politeness or impoliteness out of context, and often opinions which are similar to others sharing their communities. They must have some kind of semantic knowledge; or, to put it another way, the pragmatics of these expressions must be semantically encoded in some way. 3.3. Yes and no, impoliteness is partly inherent in linguistic expressions Perhaps the clearest statement of the dual view appears in Leech (1983). Here, Leech distinguishes between ‘‘absolute politeness’’ and ‘‘relative politeness’’. Absolute politeness is: ‘‘a scale, or rather a set of scales [. . .], having a negative and positive pole. Some illocutions (e.g. orders) are inherently impolite, and others (e.g. offers) are inherently polite’’ (1983:83). Relative politeness is ‘‘politeness relative to context or situation’’ (1983:102), ‘‘to some norm of behaviour which, for a particular setting, [people] regard as typical’’ (1983:84). Leech (1983:102) provides the following illustration: In an absolute sense, [1] Just be quiet is less polite than [2] Would you please be quiet for a moment? But there are occasions where [1] could be too polite, and other occasions where [2] would not be polite enough. There are even some cases where [2] would strike one as less polite than [1]; where, for example, [1] was interpreted as a form of banter, and where [2] was used ironically. Leech’s examples also include cross-cultural politeness variation. More recently, Leech (2007) changed the labels of these two types of politeness to a ‘‘semantic politeness scale’’ and a ‘‘pragmatic politeness scale’’, and clarified that these are ‘‘two ways of looking at politeness’’ (2007:174); that is, there is no claim that there are two discrete types of politeness. Leech, of course, is not the only person to argue for a dual view. Craig et al. (1986:456, original emphasis) put it in this way: The difficulty of rating politeness independently of appropriateness suggests that a distinction should be made between politeness as a system of message strategies and politeness as a social judgment. Politeness strategies can be identified in messages, albeit often with some difficulty, with limited use of context. Politeness judgments, on the other hand, are highly context-dependent, perhaps highly variable social-cognitive phenomena. Politeness judgments, although influenced by politeness strategies, are far from wholly determined by them. Note that although the distinction is proposed, it is acknowledged that there is some ‘‘difficulty’’ in maintaining it. Indeed, in the years following the 1980s research cited here, there was a shift in the way language and context are conceptualised. The papers in Duranti and Goodwin (1992), for example, emphasised that context is dynamic and constructed in situ, and that language and context are not two separate entities but rather held in a mutually dependent relationship. In fact, the role of language in constructing context had been clearly flagged for many years in Gumperz’s (e.g. 1982) work on ‘‘contextualisation cues’’. My own position is dual in the sense that I see semantic (im)politeness and pragmatic (im)politeness as inter-dependent opposites on a scale. (Im)politeness can be more inherent in a linguistic expression or can be more determined by context, but neither the expression nor the context guarantee an interpretation of (im)politeness. What is different about semantic

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(im)politeness from, say, the semantics of the noun ‘‘table’’ is that it is the relationship between the expression and its interpersonal contextual effects that must be the central semanticised component for it to exist. If impoliteness is defined as a negative evaluative attitude evoked by certain situated communicative behaviours, then an expression that did not in some way link itself to interpersonal context could hardly be inherently impolite. Expressions can be semanticized for impoliteness effects to varying degrees. This is spelt out and illustrated by Terkourafi (2008:74, footnote 27): Paralleling what happens with face-constituting expressions that may be conventionalised to a higher or lower degree, swear words may semantically encode face-threat, but other constructions may simply pragmatically implicate face-threat in a generalised manner on a par with generalised conversational implicatures of politeness (Terkourafi, 2003, 2005b). The following sections consider this conventionalisation more closely. 4. Conventionalised politeness formulae and their basis Terkourafi’s (e.g. 2001, 2002, 2005a) frame-based approach to politeness does not appeal to general or potentially problematic notions such as indirectness or pragmatic politeness strategies. Instead, she argues that we should analyse the concrete linguistic realisations (i.e. formulae) and particular contexts of use which co-constitute ‘‘frames’’. Moreover, ‘‘[i]t is the regular co-occurrence of particular types of context and particular linguistic expressions as the unchallenged realisations of particular acts that create the perception of politeness’’ (2005a:248; see also 2005b:213). The fact that the formulae are not only associated with a particular context but go unchallenged is an important point. This feature seems to be similar to Haugh’s (2007:312) claim that evidence of politeness can be found in, amongst other things, ‘‘the reciprocation of concern evident in the adjacent placement of expressions of concern relevant to the norms invoked in that particular interaction’’. Terkourafi suggests that it is through this regularity of co-occurrence that we acquire ‘‘a knowledge of which expressions to use in which situations’’ (2002:197), that is, ‘‘experientially acquired structures of anticipated ‘default’ behaviour’’ (2002:197). She also points out that formulae are more easily processed by both speaker and hearer, when juggling face concerns, goals, and so on, and also that using them demonstrates a knowledge of community norms (2002:196). Thus, ‘‘formulaic speech carries the burden of polite discourse’’ (2002:197; see also references given in 2005b:213). The fact that this is so accounts for the observation that politeness often passes unnoticed (Kasper, 1990:193). Terkourafi (2005b:213; see also 2001:130) defines conventionalisation as: a relationship holding between utterances and context, which is a correlate of the (statistical) frequency with which an expression is used in one’s experience of a particular context. Conventionalisation is thus a matter of degree, and may well vary in different speakers, as well as for the same speaker over time. This does not preclude the possibility that a particular expression may be conventionalised in a particular context for virtually all speakers of a particular language, thereby appearing to be a convention of the language. Note that there is a scale of conventionalisation: pragmatic meanings can become more semanticized (i.e. conventional for the majority of the speakers of the language). Terkourafi argues that it is the ‘‘potential for variation [which] keeps conventionalised inferences apart from conventional ones (Strawson, 1964)’’ (2005c:298). We can illustrate this with respect to impoliteness. In British culture, asserting that somebody is a ‘‘cunt’’, ‘‘motherfucker’’ or ‘‘wanker’’ deploys impoliteness formulae which are relatively semantically encoded in terms of their impolite effects across a range of contexts. But not all, which is partly why it is more appropriate to view impoliteness, and politeness, formulae as conventionalised rather than fully conventional or semantic. For example, cunt was generally viewed as the most offensive word in British English in the year 2000 (MillwoodHargrave, 2000). Now consider the final sentences of this diary report from a British undergraduate: A close friend of mine from Norway was eating with myself and my parents. They asked about our shared friends and my friend (Eddie) began to tell anecdotes about them. Throughout this point he used the word ‘cunt’ repeatedly. I felt very embarrassed as I knew that Eddie uses this word in the place of words like ‘guy’ and ‘dude’. In our circle of friends ‘‘Hi cunt’’ was a friendly greeting. What I have been referring to as conventionalised meaning (as opposed to conventional meaning) sits midway between semantics and pragmatics, between fully conventionalised and non-conventionalized meanings (Levinson, 2000:25). The kind of conventionalised formulae I have been describing above, where the pragmatic meaning is conventionally associated with an expression, has been accounted for within Neo-Gricean pragmatics (e.g. Levinson, 2000). An elegant Neo-Gricean account of the pragmatic inferencing pertaining to conventionalised politeness formulae (involving a generalised conversational implicature), and also of the inferencing that takes place in achieving politeness when such formulae are absent (involving a particularised conversational implicature), is given in Terkourafi (e.g. 2001, 2005b, and especially 2003). The general idea here of co-occurrence regularities between language forms and specific contexts is a familiar one in the world of sociolinguistics. It is out of this regularity that sociolinguistic resources develop. Consider, for example, how Bakhtin’ s (1986:60, original emphasis) notion of ‘‘speech genres’’ captures such regularities: ‘‘Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances’’.

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Furthermore, such formulae resonate with much earlier work within interactional sociolinguistics. They are similar to Gumperz’s notion of contextualisation cues (e.g. 1982). Gumperz (1982:162, my emphasis) elaborates: The identification of specific conversational exchanges as representative of socio-culturally familiar activities is the process I have called ‘contextualisation’ [. . .]. It is the process by which we evaluate message meaning and sequencing patterns in relation to aspects of the surface structure of the message, called ‘contextualisation cues’. The linguistic basis for this matching procedure resides in ‘cooccurrence expectations,’ which are learned in the course of previous interactive experience and form part of our habitual and instinctive linguistic knowledge. Cooccurrence expectations enable us to associate styles in speaking with contextual presuppositions. We regularly rely upon these matching processes in everyday conversation. Although they are rarely talked about and tend to be noticed only when things go wrong, without them we would be unable to relate what we hear to previous experience. 5. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae and their basis 5.1. Frequency-in-context and impoliteness formulae Not surprisingly, given her focus on politeness, Terkourafi concentrates on statistical regularities of usage: ‘‘politeness is not a matter of rational calculation, but of habits’’ (2005a:250); ‘‘Empirically, frames take the form of observable regularities of usage’’ (2001:185). Could conventionalised impoliteness formulae have the same basis as that argued for politeness formulae? Are they conventionalised frequency correlations between forms and particular contexts? My argument is that impoliteness cannot be adequately treated thus. A particular problem is that impoliteness formulae are much less frequent than politeness formulae. Leech (1983:105) states that ‘‘conflictive illocutions tend, thankfully, to be rather marginal to human linguistic behaviour in normal circumstances’’. It is difficult to see how society would function if people were impolite (and perceived to be so) most of the time. This is a reason why Leech’s statement is likely to be correct. Finding solid empirical evidence to support it is not easy. In my own ‘‘everyday’’ interactions (e.g. interacting with my family, buying a ticket for the bus, talking to colleagues at work), examples of impoliteness are relatively rare. I have some evidence that they are similarly rare for others. I collected a 100 diary-type reports of impoliteness events in which students were involved. Although the students were given a week or more in which to report such events, many told me that they failed to find one to report (despite there being a financial incentive to do so!). In fact, I ended up administering, with the help of colleagues, report-forms to well over 1000 students in order to gain 100 completions. Further evidence may also be in the fact that the icons of English politeness please and thank you occur so much more frequently than possible icons of impoliteness such as cunt and motherfucker (the two British English lexical items considered most offensive in the year 2000, according to Millwood-Hargrave, 2000). In the two-billion word Oxford English Corpus the frequencies are: please (14,627), thank you (5533), cunt (157) and motherfucker (88). Of course, there is no guarantee that all these instances of usage actually involved politeness or impoliteness (some might have been, for example, sarcasm or banter), but, given the huge frequency differentials, there seems to be support for the idea that impoliteness is relatively rare in terms of its general frequency. Moreover, one cannot dismiss the infrequency of cunt and motherfucker as being an artefact of the particular composition of the OEC. The OEC includes very informal, unregulated and unedited texts. For example, it contains approximately 150 million words of weblog and chatroom discussion (see http:// www.askoxford.com/oec, for further details). Such computer-mediated interaction is relatively dense in impoliteness phenomena, as is testified by Locher (2010), a journal special issue on politeness and impoliteness in computer-mediated communication. Impoliteness, however, does play a central role and is relatively frequent in specific discourses, such as army recruit training, interactions between car owners and traffic wardens, exploitative TV, and so on (see, for example, Culpeper et al., 2003:1545–1546; Bousfield, 2008)—contexts to which perhaps my students and I are not very often party. The crucial point about conventionality discussed in the previous section is that it relates to specific contexts of use. For impoliteness formulae, these ‘‘abnormal’’ circumstances are indeed such specific contexts. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae can and do develop here, and I will pursue this avenue in section 6.2. Where there is an interesting point of difference with politeness formulae is that people acquire a knowledge of impoliteness formulae that far exceeds their own direct experience of usage of formulae associated with impolite effects in such contexts. This, I argue, is because they also draw upon indirect experience, and in particular metadiscourse. 5.2. Impoliteness metadiscourse Indirect experience of impoliteness formulae includes experience of discourse about impoliteness discourse, i.e. impoliteness metadiscourse. It is in such metadiscourse that impoliteness formulae are mentioned rather than used. Indirect experience is accommodated within Terkourafi’s framework. She notes: In acquiring language both by hearing it and by actively producing it, speakers develop repertoires of frames which include frames of which they only have a ‘passive’ knowledge. For example, in sexually segregated societies, men will be aware of women’s ‘ways of speaking’, although they themselves will not use them. (2001:182)

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However, Terkourafi does not dwell on indirect experience or metadiscourse, and her analyses are focussed squarely on direct experience—none of which is surprising, given that she focuses on politeness. Impoliteness, in contrast, casts a much larger shadow than its frequency of usage would suggest. Behaviours and expressions considered impolite are more noticed and discussed than politeness (cf. Watts, 2003:5). Impoliteness formulae are far from marginal in terms of their psychological salience, because their very abnormality (relative to their general frequency of use) attracts attention—they are foregrounded against the generally expected state for conversation, namely, politeness (Fraser, 1990:233). Not surprisingly, then, they are commented on and debated in all types of media, in official documents and in everyday chat, and so on. However, psychological salience is only part of what is going on here. Metadiscourse plays a role in the group dynamic that gives rise to a behaviour being evaluated as impolite in the first place. Whilst any specific usage of impoliteness can be described in terms of face damage to individuals (as demonstrated in, for example, Bousfield, 2008), those usages often have reverberations some of which are articulated in impoliteness metadiscourse for the broader community in which they take place. Jaworski et al. (2004:3, original emphasis) make a useful comment on the general role of metadiscourse: Metalinguistic representations may enter public consciousness and come to constitute structured understandings, perhaps even ‘common sense’ understandings – of how language works, what it is usually like, what certain ways of speaking connote and imply, what they ought to be like.’ The important point here is that we gain ‘‘understandings’’ of what language is ‘‘usually like’’ and ‘‘what certain ways of speaking connote and imply’’ without recourse to the frequency of direct experience. Note that the argument is not merely that metadiscourse is a reflex of behaviours, but that metadiscourse comes to ‘‘constitute structured understandings’’, including, in particular, understandings about what ‘‘certain ways of speaking’’ ‘‘ought to be like’’. A case where impoliteness is clearly linked to the ‘‘social oughts’’ of metadiscourse concerns rules. Rules proscribing behaviours considered impolite are a kind of metadiscourse articulated and imposed by institutions (e.g. schools, the workplace, public service entities, government agencies) on various others, by adults on children, teachers on pupils, and so on. Such rules are part of our social morality. Lewis (1969:103) states that rules ‘‘codify regularities’’ of behaviour. However, it is also possible to have rules that people regularly ignore. Rules do not depend on regularities, but arise from social norms. Anderson (2000:17) defines a social norm as ‘‘a standard of behaviour shared by a social group, commonly understood by its members as authoritative or obligatory for them’’. Let us consider social norms and the group dynamic that drives metadiscourse a little more closely, turning in particular to Margaret Gilbert’s (1989) classic book On Social Facts. Margaret Gilbert (1989:377) proposes that: our everyday concept of a social convention is that of a jointly accepted principle of action, a group fiat with respect to how one is to act in certain situations.[. . .] Further, each party to the convention will accept that each one personally ought to conform, other things being equal, where the ‘ought’ is understood to be based on the fact that together they jointly accepted the principle. (1989:377). The focus here is not on the individual but on the group. Her argument is that belonging to a social group is part and parcel of accepting the norms that constitute it, and adopting a group’s fiat is a matter of making manifest one’s willingness to do so. People are not fundamentally driven by self-interest or the fear of sanctions, but by the stake they have in galvanising that social convention in the first place. That stake is to do with group membership, with people’s sense of identity with various groups (see related points made in Terkourafi, 2002). Gilbert (1989:377) notes that nonconforming behaviour, as indeed impoliteness often is, provokes strong reactions because it raises questions of relationships to others and also what kind of behaviour is appropriate given those relationships. So, impoliteness metadiscourse (e.g. condemning an impoliteness behaviour, upholding a rule) can be driven by the need to demonstrate one’s orientation to a group and the norms by which it is constituted. Where Gilbert’s (1989) account has something of a deficit, in my view, is that it skates over the unequal influence particular groups have (and individuals in groups have) in reproducing and imposing social norms. Impoliteness rules and punitive sanctions are unidirectional: they are imposed by the more powerful on the less. The issue here is of dominant ideologies, belief systems that can sustain and normalise the social conventions that serve power hierarchies. Silverstein (1998) stresses the importance of ideology in relation to indexical processes, indexicals, as Silverstein defines them, having a strong affinity with Gumperz’s (e.g. 1982) notion of contextualisation cues (cf. Mertz, 1998:152) and thus also my understanding of conventionalised impoliteness. He writes: ideologies present invokable schemata in which to explain/interpret the meaningful flow of indexicals. As such, they are necessary to and drive default modes of the gelling of this flow into textlike chunks. Ideologies are, thus, conceptualized as relatively perduring with respect to the indexicals-in-context that they construe. And we recognise such schemata characteristically by the way that they constitute rationalizing, systematizing, and, indeed most importantly, naturalizing schemata: schemata that ‘‘explain’’ the indexical value of signs in terms of some order(s) of phenomena stipulatively presupposable by hence, in context, autonomous of the indexical phenomena to be understood. (1998:129, original emphasis) Note that such ideologies echo Jaworski, Coupland and Galasin´ski’s ‘‘‘common sense’ understandings’’ (2004:3). Ideologies are involved in explaining/interpreting what counts as conventionalized impoliteness in particular contexts. For example, a

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five-year old boy in a swimming pool changing room in the UK said to his father: ‘‘I want my Kinder chocolate right now’’. To which, his father replied: ‘‘You’re not getting anything if you’re being rude’’. The boy’s use of a relatively direct request (‘‘I want X’’) coupled with the aggravator ‘‘right now’’ transgressed the ideologically natural, non-negotiable order whereby in the interpersonal context of the family certain members are accorded certain forms of language with certain indexical values, and transgressions count as rude, impolite, etc., evidence for which is displayed in the father’s metadiscourse.4 Although Terkourafi does not deploy the label ideology, her framework encompasses the evaluative beliefs a community has that something is (un)acceptable in a particular context. When one learns a conventionally polite expression, one learns the evaluative judgment in the community that expression counts as polite in that context (cf. Terkourafi, 2001:142–143). More specifically, she deploys the notion of ‘‘frame’’ (which, as we saw, do Locher and Watts, 2005) to help capture this evaluative link between language and context. There clearly is some overlap here with the notion of ideology. My understanding of ideology is that of van Dijk (e.g. 1987, 1988), who takes a socio-cognitive view drawing on schema theory (e.g. Bartlett, [1932] 1995; Rumelhart, 1984), something which makes it broadly compatible with the notion of frame. According to Eysenck and Keane (2010:401), schemata are ‘‘well-integrated packets of knowledge about the world, events, people, and actions’’, and include ‘‘what are often referred to as scripts and frames’’. van Dijk argues that evaluative beliefs can be represented as attitude schemata and these provide the foundation ‘‘needed to assess the (inter)subjective ‘position’ of social members’’ towards behaviours (van Dijk, 1987:189). As I suggested in section 2, impoliteness can be considered a kind of attitude, more precisely, an attitude schema comprised of certain evaluative beliefs concerning certain behaviours. It is clusters of attitudes shared amongst members of a social group which constitute ideologies (van Dijk, 1988, 1990), and could be labelled, for example, ‘‘conservative’’, ‘‘racist’’ or ‘‘sexist’’. Some attitudes constitute ‘‘impoliteness’’ ideologies, which play a role in determining what counts as impolite and sustain and are sustained through metadiscourse by those who dominate the particular group power structures. Insults, for example, particularly those involving social identities and face (e.g. racist and sexist insults), can be a means of controlling others as well as maintaining dominant groups in society at the expense of others. 6. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae in English: methodological approaches and findings Following on from the arguments presented thus far, two (inter-connected) methods for identifying conventionalised impoliteness formulae present themselves: 1. Study those specific contexts in which participant(s) regularly display an understanding that something impolite was expressed (what expressions were used, if any?). 2. Study the metadiscourse concerning behaviours understood to be impolite (what expressions are they talking about, if any?). The first method is akin to that adopted by Terkourafi (e.g. 2001) for politeness formulae. I will concentrate on a version of this method in section 6.2, but first I briefly illustrate the second method. 6.1. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae and metadiscourse In this section, I explore general impoliteness rules which apply to a variety of contexts, including private contexts, that is, in-group contexts involving, for example, friends or family. To do this, I will survey a rudeness ‘‘manual’’ designed for everyday contexts. It concerns American English and relates to the North American cultural context. Montry’s (2002) How To Be Rude! A Training Manual for Mastering the Art of Rudeness is a humorous parody of etiquette manuals. Instead of training the reader in polite behaviours, it trains them in impolite behaviours. Each page contains an imperative statement. The book is a list of ‘‘dos’’ rather than ‘‘don’ts’’ (the stuff of politeness manuals). Of course, one might be concerned that these are not ‘‘real’’ rules. However, the success of the humour depends on the reader recognising the rule that has been recommended for breaking—they must ring true. The following items are quoted from the chapter General Rudeness (pp. 1–50). I have not included items which overlap with others or which could be non-communicative behaviours (e.g. sneezing without covering your mouth). The groupings of the items and italicised labels are mine (I have inserted punctuation between the two parts of most entries so they make sense when presented as continuous lines). Patronising behaviour (including condescending, belittling, ridiculing and demeaning behaviours): Producing or perceiving a display of power that infringes an understood power hierarchy  Be really condescending; example: ‘‘What would YOU know about that?’’ (p. 2)  Treat people in a service capacity as if they are beneath you; whenever possible, use terms like ‘‘the little people’’ or ‘‘the help’’. (p. 40)  When dining in a restaurant, snap your fingers at the waiter when you want something. (p. 41)  Make fun of people: laugh loudly and point. (p. 4) 4 In the terms of Terkourafi’s (e.g. 2003) framework, the boy’s utterance breaks the relevant politeness frame, thus triggering a particularised implicature of impoliteness.

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 Talk loudly and slowly to people who speak a different language; use exaggerated hand gestures. (p. 7) Insults (including derogatory statements and implications): Producing or perceiving a display of low values for some target  Make derogatory statements about people of another race, religion, or lifestyle, preferably when those people are within earshot. (p. 6)  Ask an overweight woman when she is ‘due’. (p. 28)  Ask any stay-at-home Mom what she does all day. (p. 29) Pointed criticism (including expressions of disapproval and statements of fault, weakness or disadvantage): Producing or perceiving a display of low values for some target  Criticise: earn extra points if you make someone cry. (p. 33) Encroachment: Producing or perceiving a display of infringement of personal space (literal or metaphorical)  Encroach on someone’s personal space; remember, the minimum radius is two feet. (p. 8)  Eavesdrop then turn around and add your opinion to the conversation. (p. 9)  Snoop: anything that you have no business looking into would be appropriate. (p. 24)  Ask people how much they’ve paid for stuff; be persistent. (p. 14)  Call people before 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday or Sunday morning. (p. 15) Exclusion (including failure to include and disassociation): Producing or perceiving a display of infringement of inclusion  Talk about people in the third person whilst they’re standing next to you. (p. 3) Failure to reciprocate: Producing or perceiving a display of infringement of the reciprocity norm  NEVER write a thank-you note. (p. 23) Even from my British cultural perspective, I have no difficulty at all in recognising these rules. Interestingly, all of the items can be accommodated within my earlier work (e.g. 1996) which proposed a taxonomy of impoliteness strategies. In fact, the pragmatic level is precisely the level at which I think this method can make the greatest contribution: it is good at capturing pragmatic strategies in which impoliteness formulae may or may not be embedded. 6.2. Conventionalised impoliteness formulae and frequency in impoliteness contexts Data is a major problem for impoliteness research. Discourse completion tasks and role plays, amongst the most frequently used methodologies in quantitative politeness research, are problematic, since people are particularly reluctant to be recorded producing impoliteness, and there are ethical considerations as well. For the same reasons, it is also very difficult to collect naturally-occurring data. However, I have collected the following datasets (all in the public domain): 1. Tapped phone calls. Available as part of courtroom transcripts in North America (e.g. www.courttv.com; some sound files are available), particularly those submitted as evidence because they are deemed threatening or abusive. 2. Fly-on-the-wall documentaries. Approximately 20 h from programmes about army recruit training (Soldiers, Soldiers To Be, Soldier Girls and Red Caps); approximately 10 h from programmes about traffic wardens (Clampers and Car Wars). 3. Fly-on-the-wall pseudo-documentaries. Fly-on-the-wall recordings of contrived situations designed to spark conflict; approximately 10 h (Wife Swap and Supernanny). 4. ‘‘Exploitative’’ TV shows. Approximately 12 h from a quiz show (The Weakest Link) and a talent show (Pop Idol). 5. Graffiti dialogues. 51 graffiti dialogues collected from Lancaster University library desks by Chris Hayes (a former student). These data are largely drawn from UK-based cultures, including a mix of genders, social classes and ages. Some data are North American. These data predominantly concern contexts where social conventions sustaining polite behaviours are flouted by those in power in order to coerce (as for example in threatening phone calls) or entertain (as for example the exploitative TV shows); where social conventions legitimate impolite behaviours (as for example in army training); or where misunderstandings about what the social conventions are arise. In addition, and in order to make up for a deficit regarding ‘‘everyday’’ data, I used my diaryreport data, that is, 100 accounts of offensive interactions elicited from undergraduate students. The procedure I adopted for identifying candidates for conventionalised impoliteness formulae begins by collecting specific utterances within the above data to which somebody, typically the target, displayed evidence that they took the utterance as impolite. This, of course, begs the question of what that evidence was. My sources of evidence, ordered in terms of their weight in guiding my interpretation, were as follows: 1. Co-text, 2. Retrospective comments, and 3. Certain non-verbal reactions. These points capture the idea that people react to impoliteness in certain ways, not least of all through the articulation of an emotional response. The first point, co-text, is a hugely valuable source of participant understandings. A participant’s (prototypically the target’s) or observer’s evaluation that something was impolite, sometimes including explicit impoliteness

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metapragmatic comments and/or metadiscourse (e.g. ‘‘that was bloody rude’’), gives us good evidence that impoliteness offence was taken. The second and third points are in some ways subcategories of the first. By retrospective comments I am referring to comments made after the interactional event in question. These often take the shape of long discussions by participants and/or observers about whether X counts as impolite. Regarding non-verbal reactions, impoliteness is associated with certain emotional reactions, and sometimes those emotions are evident in particular non-verbal actions (e.g. looking downwards, biting one’s lip) (though we need to be wary of the fact that non-verbal emotion displays can also be strategically controlled to some extent). As I accumulated candidates for impoliteness formulae, I grouped them according to structural commonalities. What I have in mind here is the Pattern Grammar of Gill Francis and Susan Hunston (Francis et al., 1996, 1998; Hunston and Francis, 2000). Hunston and Francis define a pattern as: a phraseology frequently associated with (a sense of) a word, particularly in terms of the prepositions, groups, and clauses that follow the word. Patterns and lexis are mutually dependent, in that each pattern occurs with a restricted set of lexical items, and each lexical item occurs with a restricted set of patterns. (2000:3) The pattern of a word can be defined as all the words and structures which are regularly associated with the word and which contribute to its meaning. A pattern can be identified if a combination of words occurs relatively frequently, if it is dependent on a particular word choice, and if there is a clear meaning associated with it. (2000:37) Patterns are sets of words which are semantically congruent in some way and which have grammatically patterned co-texts. They create specific meanings as a whole. Meaning is understood to include pragmatic meanings (see in particular Stubbs, 2001). In this approach to grammar, there is no clear borderline between syntactic and lexical structures, something which echoes other approaches including, for example, Construction Grammar (e.g. Goldberg, 1995). I have also checked the robustness of all impoliteness formulae in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), with the exception of the category involving questions or presuppositions. I operated the criterion that at least 50% of any one formula’s variants had to involve impoliteness in more than 50% of the OEC’s instances, that is, those instances had to be accompanied by evidence that they were interpreted as impoliteness (where the number of OEC instances was overwhelming, I analysed the first 100). For example, for the formula shut up, only one other variant emerged, namely, shut the fuck up. Shut up has a strong correlation with impoliteness events in the OEC data, but does not clearly exceed the 50% level (it can express, for instance, solidarity). In contrast, shut the fuck up, has a stronger correlation, clearly exceeding 50%.5 Hence, this formula type is listed. The conventionalised impoliteness formulae identified thus are as follows. Square brackets are designed to give an indication of some of the structural characteristics of the formulae (finer grained structural analyses are possible, including a consideration of the degree of optionality each element has). Alternatives are indicated with slashes. Insults 1. Personalized negative vocatives - [you] [fucking/rotten/dirty/fat/little/etc.] [moron/fuck/plonker/dickhead/berk/pig/shit/bastard/loser/liar/minx/brat/ slut/squirt/sod/bugger, etc.] [you] 2. Personalized negative assertions - [you] [are] [so/such a] [shit/stink/thick/stupid/bitchy/bitch/hypocrite/disappointment/gay/nuts/nuttier than a fruit cake/hopeless/pathetic/fussy/terrible/fat/ugly/etc.] - [you] [can’t do] [anything right/basic arithmetic/etc.] - [you] [disgust me/make me] [sick/etc.] 3. Personalized negative references - [your] [stinking/little] [mouth/act/arse/body/corpse/hands/guts/trap/breath/etc.] 4. Personalized third-person negative references (in the hearing of the target) - [the] [daft] [bimbo] - [she] [’s] [nutzo] Pointed criticisms/complaints - [that/this/it] [is/was] [absolutely/extraordinarily/unspeakably/etc.] [bad/rubbish/crap/horrible/terrible/etc.] Challenging or unpalatable questions and/or presuppositions - why do you make my life impossible? - which lie are you telling me? - what’s gone wrong now? - you want to argue with me or you want to go to jail?

5 It is worth noting points made by Biber (2009:280–281), namely that, whilst patterns clearly involve frequency, in practice pattern grammar studies have not provided evidence of frequency, and indeed some corpus linguists have argued that for something to count as recurrent it only needs to occur more than twice.

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Condescensions (see also the use of ‘‘little’’ in Personalized negative references) - [that] [’s/is being] [babyish/childish/etc.] Message enforcers - listen here (preface) - you got [it/that]? (tag) - do you understand [me]? (tag) Dismissals - [go] [away] - [get] [lost/out] - [fuck/piss/shove] [off] Silencers - [shut] [it]/[your] [stinking/fucking/etc.] [mouth/face/trap/etc.] - shut [the fuck] up Threats - [I’ll/I’m/we’re] [gonna] [smash your face in/beat the shit out of you/box your ears/bust your fucking head off/straighten - you out/etc.] [if you don’t] [X] - [X] [before I] [hit you/strangle you] Negative expressives (e.g. curses, ill-wishes) - [go] [to hell/hang yourself/fuck yourself] - [damn/fuck] [you] Of course, this list reflects regularities in my data; it is not a list of all English conventionalised impoliteness formulae. Having said that, I would be surprised if this list did not include many very generally used English conventionalised impoliteness formulae. Conversely, some items that one might expect to be included are not, simply because they did not occur frequently enough. For example, taboo words or behaviours can trigger a judgement of impoliteness, but they seem to do this per se extremely rarely—a mere two cases occurred in 100 diary reports. In most cases taboo words operate in conjunction with impoliteness formulae such as those above. Some of the conventionalised impoliteness formulae listed may look somewhat innocuous, that is, relatively context-dependent for their impoliteness effects. However, as items conventionalised in spoken interaction for impoliteness effects they will have consistent prosodic and nonverbal support (e.g. sharply falling intonation, tense voice quality, increased loudness, frowning and pointing). Inconsistent accompanying prosodic and nonverbal signals are likely to suggest that the impoliteness is non-genuine, that it is, for example, banter, and thus would not be a feature of the kind of impoliteness events I am dealing with here. 7. Conclusion Having offered a brief definition of impoliteness, I began this paper by considering arguments for politeness being wholly inherent in linguistic expressions. In fact, it is very difficult to find mainstream supporters of this position. Discursive scholars who oppose it are, to an extent, shooting at a straw target. Discursive work, perhaps by definition, is focused on dynamic, locally constructed meanings. However, I argued that critics of discursive work have also been shooting at something of a straw target, as such approaches do accommodate norms. Nevertheless, the impression discursive approaches give is of great instability of meaning and uncertainty in communication. This impression does not square with the intuitions we share with others in our communities about conventionalised meanings even out of context, nor with the evidence for a large amount of informational redundancy in multi-modal communication—all of which points towards stability and certainty (though of course these can never be absolute). My own position might be described as dual: there is a semantic side and a pragmatic side to impoliteness, both being interdependent opposites on a scale, neither guaranteeing an interpretation that something is impolite in context. A conventionalised impoliteness formula is a form of language in which context-specific impoliteness effects are conventionalised. I approached this issue via conventionalised politeness formulae, reporting the work of Marina Terkourafi, where it is argued that they arise as a result of regularities of co-occurrence between unchallenged expressions and particular types of context. My next step was to take this forward with respect to impoliteness. The problem here is that people have knowledge of impoliteness formulae which far exceeds their direct experience of them. So, frequency cannot be the sole or even dominant factor in their conventionalisation. I argued that indirect experiences play a key role in the conventionalisation of impoliteness formulae, and especially experience of metadiscourse (e.g. comments, debates and rules about impoliteness events). This metadiscourse is the long shadow of impoliteness behaviours. It is partly driven by the salience of any impoliteness behaviour, but also by the fact that that metadiscourse is part of the social dynamic that makes a behaviour count as impolite in the first place. Impoliteness behaviours rupture social norms—principles of action jointly accepted by members of groups who

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demonstrate their group membership by upholding those principles in impoliteness metadiscourse. I also argued that these social norms are part of and underpinned by ideologies, particularly dominant ideologies, and those ideologies are involved in determining, not least of all via impoliteness metadiscourse, what counts as impoliteness. I proposed two methodologies for investigating conventionalised impoliteness formulae, one being to investigate the expressions to which impoliteness metadiscourse orients, and the other being to focus on regularities of expression in impoliteness contexts. I provided a brief demonstration of how the first method might proceed. A limitation of this method is that whilst good at revealing pragmatic strategies those strategies may or may not have specific linguistic expressions embedded within them. An enormous quantity of data would be required to see but a few trends regarding impoliteness formulae. The second method focussed on contexts associated with impoliteness events. I collected utterances accompanied by participant evidence that somebody had construed them as impolite. With Pattern Grammar in mind, I then generated a list of conventionalised impoliteness formulae in English. Of course, all of these items would benefit from further refinement and validation (for example, there is great variation in the optionality of the elements which constitute a formula). The fact that my list of conventionalised impoliteness formulae was devised on the basis of frequency in specific types of context is something that it has in common with Terkourafi’s account of politeness formulae. From a methodological point of view, this is the most effective way to identify impoliteness formulae. Finally, it should be further stressed that conventionalised impoliteness formulae are not the only means of triggering attributions of impoliteness—they can also be triggered by something non-verbal or by an implication. But conventionalised impoliteness formulae exist and are important. They can be creatively exploited, either by breaking the formula itself or by deploying a formula so that there is a mismatch between the context it projects and the communicative situation in which it is contextualised, or between the context projected by one formula and that projected by its co-text—cases which give rise to phenomena such as sarcasm or banter. Acknowledgement The project of which this publication is a part is funded by the U.K.’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES063-27-0015). I am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of this article, who went to great lengths in providing stimulating and detailed feedback. 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Jonathan Culpeper is a senior lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, UK. His work spans pragmatics, stylistics and the history of English. He recently completed a three-year Research Fellowship funded by the ESRC, in which he focused on impoliteness.