Seminar I Future Research in Linguistic Impoliteness: A Personal Reflection

Many of my talks about impoliteness look backwards, surveying what has happened over the decades and concluding with the current state-of-the-art. This talk focuses on the future, and specifically my future work, which I hope will be of some interest. I am involved in three different projects, each at varying stages of completion, and each involving different groups of collaborators. The first is in tune with my sense that sometimes the linguistic side of (im)politeness is overlooked, particularly given the dominance of discursive and/or post-modern approaches. We have been looking at the grammar of impoliteness, and specifically you + np structures (e.g. you idiot) across English, Dutch and Polish. The second is distinctive in its use of corpus methods. We have been examining the distribution of numerous politeness expressions (please, thank you, sir, goodbye, etc.) in the British National Corpus 2014 across the social and contextual categories recorded in the metadata (e.g. geographical location; public versus private). The third is notable for its challenging data. We are investigating impoliteness online, and in particular the notion of reciprocity. This raises all sorts of challenges, not least of which is that much of (im)politeness theory assumes a speaker addressing a hearer face-to-face with no overhearing audience. Our particular innovation here is that we are going to try to quantify specific interactive features (and produce visualisations of them), in order to highlight what might be distinctive about online impoliteness. In this talk, I will give the flavour of each of the three research projects, covering the aims, issues and early results.