How to be impolite: Rating offensive strategies.

摘要

Recent studies on impoliteness (Beebe 1995, Kienpointner 1997) have shown that politeness is not always the norm and that impoliteness is not unusual in everyday interactions. A few models of impoliteness (Lachenich 1980, Austin 1990, Culpeper 1996) have developed in the literature postulating strategies designed to attack the addressee's face. There are, however, a number of issues that have been overlooked in these models.; First, the models have failed to distinguish all the different impoliteness strategies available to the speaker if he/she decides to attack the addressee. Moreover, none of the models has suggested what the order of the strategies should be with regards to their degree of offense.; This study aims at identifying all the different impoliteness strategies available to the speaker and investigates on their degree of offense. In this way, this study also intends to contribute to resolve the controversy in the literature about the muting function of sarcastic irony.; The findings of this study show that an on-record attack to positive face is the most offensive of all the impoliteness strategies and, that sarcastic irony does not seem to mute the degree of offense relative to direct, literal criticism.