Why impolite

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.