Miriam A. Locher

Derek Bousfield

The volume addresses the enormous imbalance that exists between academic interest in politeness phenomena when compared to impoliteness phenomena. Researchers working with Brown and Levinson's ([1978] 1987) seminal work on politeness rarely focused explicitly on impoliteness. As a result, only one aspect of facework/relational work has been studied in detail. Next to this research desideratum, politeness research is on the move again, with alternative conceptions of politeness to those of Brown and Levinson being further developed. In this volume researchers present, discuss and explore the concept of linguistic impoliteness, the crucial differences and interconnectedness between lay understandings of impoliteness and the academic concept within a theory of facework/relational work, as well as the exercise of power that is involved when impoliteness occurs. The authors offer solid discussions of the theoretical issues involved and draw on data from political interaction, interaction with legally constituted authorities, workplace interaction in the factory and the office, code-switching and Internet practices. The collection offers inspiration for research on impoliteness in many different research fields, such as (critical) discourse analysis, conversation analysis, pragmatics and stylistics, as well as linguistic approaches to studies in conflict and conflict resolution.

Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice

Impoliteness in Language

This study concerns the nature of impoliteness in face-to-face spoken interaction. For more than three decades many pragmatic and sociolinguistic studies of interaction have considered politeness to be one central explanatory concept governing and underpinning face-to-face interaction. Politeness' "evil twin" impoliteness has been largely neglected until only very recently. This book, the first of its kind on the subject, considers the role that impoliteness has to play by drawing extracts from a range of discourse types (car parking disputes, army and police training, police-public interactions and kitchen discourse). The study considers the triggering of impoliteness; explores the dynamic progression of impolite exchanges, and examines the way in which such exchanges come to some form of resolution. 'Face' and the linguistic sophistication and manipulation of discoursally expected norms to cause, or deflect impoliteness is also explored, as is the dynamic and sometimes hotly contested nature of an individual's socio-discoursal role.

Impoliteness in Interaction

Lesley Jeffries

Poetics and Linguistics Association. Conference

Dan McIntyre

This volume of articles comprises papers from the 25th annual conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), which was held at the University of Huddersfield, England, in July 2005. The theme of the conference was 'Stylistics and Social Cognition', and as usual at a PALA conference, this theme was interpreted very widely by the participants, as the reader of this book will no doubt conclude.At the heart of this volume, there is something of a reaction against the cognitive developments in stylistics, which might be seen as being in danger of privileging the individual interpretation of literature over something more social. The concern is to consider whether there is a more collective approach that could be taken to the meaning of text, and whether recent insights from cognitive stylistics could work with this idea of collectivity to define something we might call 'commonality' of meaning in texts.Stylistics and Social Cognition will be of interest to those working in stylistics and other text-analytic fields such as critical discourse analysis and those concerned with notions of interpretation, collective meaning and human communication.

Derek Bousfield

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