Impoliteness, Politeness and Mock Impoliteness in Naturally Occurring Data

Abstract

Research on politeness and impoliteness recently has been the focus of pragmatics and discourse analysis, but impoliteness has gained little attention. An effort was exerted to examine how such a phenomenon works in different cultures. However, impoliteness as a linguistic medium of face attack has not received sufficient area of research in the Arabic context and the intercultural context, which is the main aim of this paper. This paper demonstrates a range of incidents encountered by Arabic and English native speakers. The model of analysis in this paper is a postmodern discursive approach in which the evaluative process is emphasized. It has been found in this paper that impolite utterances do not necessarily involve impoliteness or rudeness when the interlocutors’ social status, familiarity and distance are the same. This paper also showed that mock impoliteness functions as a linguistic tool for establishing solidarity between the members of the same culture when there is no intention of damaging face.