Impoliteness in Interaction: (167 Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

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.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Preface; 3. Chapter 1. Impoliteness in interaction; 4. Chapter 2. Implicature: (Mis)understanding grice; 5. Chapter 3. Face within a model of im/politeness; 6. Chapter 4. Perspectives on politeness and impoliteness; 7. Chapter 5. The realisation of impoliteness; 8. Chapter 6. The dynamics of impoliteness I: Dynamics at the utterance level; 9. Chapter 7. The dynamics of impoliteness II: Dynamics at the discoursal level; 10. Chapter 8. The dynamics of impoliteness III: Exploiting the rules of the turn taking system; 11. Chapter 9. Conclusion; 12. Tables and figures; 13. Bibliography and references; 14. Index

Review :
This is a significant and very welcome contribution to the growing research on linguistic politeness in that it is the first full-length study of impoliteness of its kind. There is a long tradition of research on 'politeness' but there is no full-length work on impoliteness available. Impoliteness in Interaction fills the research gap in the study of linguistic politeness, and is accessible to general students. This is a challenging and insightful book which attempts to examine exactly what impoliteness is, what its function is in interaction and how we can go about analysing it. [...] This book is important in signalling a change in the direction of much politeness research. [...] This book challenged many of my presuppositions about impoliteness and is clearly part of a new discourse-oriented school of politeness and impoliteness research. It provides clear guidelines on how to analyse impoliteness and blazes a trail for a more data-drive type of politeness research. In the field of communication, scholars in language and social interaction will find Bousfield's book interesting and useful as it builds on key scholars in our area and offers a valuable portrait of impoliteness in institutional encounters. In addition, Bousfield's book should be of interest to interpersonal communication reseachers who study the dark side of interpersonal life. In providing a rich, nuanced sense of how people challenge, criticize, and attack each other in institutional relationships, his work offers a template that may aid researchers interested in these communicative conduct issues in close relationships. Impoliteness in Interaction is an insightful read that successfully advocates a dynamic study of not only impoliteness, but discourse in general. Bousfield does an excellent job of showing how impoliteness strategies combine via textual examples and persuasively argues that such strategies do not occur in isolation. The data discussed are entertaining and are used in a succinct manner to demonstrate the intended phenomenon. The book is intended primarily as a reference for those doing research in these areas but would also fit nicely in a graduate-level seminar on politeness, social interaction or pragmatics. Overall, I recommend Impoliteness in Interaction as an illuminating, entertaining and well-researched read that sheds light on a much ignored area of social interaction. Impoliteness in Interaction is the first monograph to focus solely on impoliteness and as such represents a very substantial and impressive contribution to our understanding about what impoliteness is, the ways in which it comes about and how it is realized in the dynamics of actual language use in particular discourses. [...] This book is very much to be welcomed as a thought-provoking, knowledgeable and generally accessible exploration of some important new and difficult theoretical ground in the field of im/politeness research, supported by compelling and interesting data.