The book presents the issue of impoliteness in media discourse found in television debates, films and computer-mediated communication. The research perspectives adopted in the book include prosody studies, corpus linguistics, neo-Gricean pragmatics, media studies and audiovisual translation.

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.

When is language considered 'impolite'? Is impolite language only used for anti-social purposes? Can impolite language be creative? What is the difference between 'impoliteness' and 'rudeness'? Grounded in naturally-occurring language data and drawing on findings from linguistic pragmatics and social psychology, Jonathan Culpeper provides a fascinating account of how impolite behaviour works. He examines not only its forms and functions but also people's understandings of it in both public and private contexts. He reveals, for example, the emotional consequences of impoliteness, how it shapes and is shaped by contexts, and how it is sometimes institutionalised. This book offers penetrating insights into a hitherto neglected and poorly understood phenomenon. It will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics and social psychology in particular.

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.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the pragmatics of social media, i.e. of digitally mediated and Internet-based platforms which are interactively used to share and edit self- and other-generated textual and audio-visual messages. Its five parts offer state-of-the-art reviews and critical evaluations in the light of on-going developments: Part I The Nature of Social Media sets up the conceptual groundwork as it explores key concept such as social media, participation, privacy/publicness. Part II Social Media Platforms focuses on the pragmatics of single platforms such as YouTube, Facebook. Part III Social Media and Discourse covers the micro-and macro-level organization of social media discourse, while Part IV Social Media and Identity reveals the multifarious ways in which users collectively (re-)construct aspects of their identities. Part V Social Media and Functions/Speech Acts surveys pragmatic studies on speech act functions such as disagreeing, complimenting, requesting. Each contribution provides a state-of-the-art review together with a critical evaluation of the existing research.

This is the first book to examine the discourse of reality television. Chapters provide rigorous case studies of the discourse practices that characterise a wide range of generic and linguistic/cultural contexts, including dating shows in China and Spain, docudramas in Argentina and New Zealand, and talent shows in the UK and USA.

Conversational Humour and (Im)politeness is the first systematic study that offers a socio-pragmatic perspective on humorous practices such as teasing, mockery and taking the piss and their relation to (im)politeness. Analysing data from corpora, reality television and interviews in Australian and British cultural contexts, this book contributes to cross-cultural and intercultural research on humour and its role in social interaction. Although, in both contexts, jocular verbal practices are highly valued and a positive response – the ‘preferred reaction’ – can be expected, the conceptualisation of what is seen as humorous can vary, especially in terms of what ‘goes too far’. By examining how attempts at humour can occasion offence, presenting a distinction between ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ perceptions of jocularity and looking at how language users evaluate jocular behaviours in interaction, this study shows how humour and (im)politeness are co-constructed and negotiated in discourse. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in pragmatics, conversational humour, (im)politeness, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, television studies and interaction in English-speaking contexts.