Abstract This paper examines respect ( ehterām ) in Persian doctor–patient interaction as a moral–relational practice through which politeness evaluations and face are jointly constituted in interaction. While post-discursive politeness research has reconceptualised politeness as an evaluative judgement grounded in moral accountability, the relationship between such evaluations and the interactional constitution of interpersonal relations has remained under-theorised. Drawing on Face Constituting Theory, this study conceptualises respect as a dialectical relational achievement grounded in the ongoing co-instantiation of connection-with and separation-from others. The analysis is based on naturally occurring Persian medical consultations, with a focus on opening sequences, address forms, and participation frameworks. Three opening encounters demonstrate distinct calibrations of respect – namely, warm and elaborated, hierarchically restrained, and minimally procedural – each realised through different configurations of the connection–separation dialectic. A contrastive case traces the progressive destabilisation and eventual collapse of this relational buffer zone, showing how disrespect emerges through cumulative interactional pressures and blocked relational calibration. The findings advance a post-discursive pragmatics account of respect that integrates moral evaluation with relational constitution, positioning respect as the analytic nexus linking politeness and face.
Abstract This study investigates a heated and highly intense political interaction: the Oval Office meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It focuses on the intersection of language, power, and ideology in political discourse through critical analysis. The study adopts a multidisciplinary framework that comprises Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), politeness theory, and Leech’s politeness maxims to explore how interlocutors utilize language to reflect dominance, manage face, and negotiate ideological positions. It draws attention to the strategic application of politeness, impoliteness, and face-threatening acts as tools for reinforcing or contesting power. The analysis brings forward how such linguistic strategies in political interaction shape perceptions of authority, influence the dynamics of cooperation, and frame discourse as a site of negotiated power. Findings showed that politeness is inherently power-dependent, with its success heavily relying on both the interlocutors’ strategies and the hearers’ willingness to recognize and reciprocate them. Through his use of language, Trump reinforced and maintained ideological dominance, constraining his adjacent interlocutor’s agency. The study also offers insights into how discourse operates as a means for negotiating power and shaping political meaning.
A stand-up comedy by American-Singaporean Jocelyn Chia concerning the missing Malaysian flight MH370 triggered significant backlash and public controversy, according to Malaysian and Singaporean media outlets, sparking discussions on the boundaries of comedic expression. Drawing from the concept of "entertaining impoliteness", this research examines the use of impoliteness in comedy, focusing on how it is creatively deployed within the rituals of the comedic form. The study explores the balance between using impolite language for humor and ensuring that it remains connected to the core purpose of comedy. The findings highlight that while impoliteness can enhance creativity, its usage is limited by the need to align with the comedic ritual, as deviating too far from the main theme risks confusing or alienating the audience. This work offers insights into the structure of comedic impoliteness and suggests that while creativity can drive comedic innovation, it must always return to the central ritual of comedy. Building on this, future work could explore how comedians in different cultural contexts negotiate impoliteness and audience expectations in their performances.
This study investigates the complex role of explanations in refusal strategies, focusing specifically on the themes, attributional dimensions, and contextual variations in Chinese speakers' refusal explanations. Despite their prevalence and recognized importance in refusal research, explanations have often been analyzed as a uniform strategy without exploring their internal variations or underlying logic. Drawing on attribution theory and rapport management frameworks, this study systematically examines how individuals attribute causes for their refusals along dimensions of locus (internal vs. external) and controllability (controllable vs. uncontrollable). Data from 100 Chinese university students were elicited through discourse completion tasks across varied contexts of power and social distance. The findings reveal eight recurring thematic categories of refusal explanations and four attributional patterns: internal-controllable, internal-uncontrollable, external-uncontrollable, and vague reasons. Notably, participants predominantly employed uncontrollable attributions to mitigate accountability and rapport threats. Attributional patterns also varied significantly with relational contexts, showing that participants strategically adapt their explanatory framing to interactional demands, particularly concerning refusees' power and social distance. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of refusals by integrating attribution theory, rapport, and accountability within pragmatics, providing fresh analytical insights and a foundational framework for future research exploring refusal discourses.
Wishes are remarks that express the desire that things will turn out well for one's interlocutor. They are among the expressive speech acts that have received scant scholarly attention. Purporting to further their study in online communication and extend the line of their comparative analysis, the present study examines wishes in the digital environment of Greek and English food blogs. Employing the relational work framework, our study examines 1,061 wishes occurring in the comment section of three Greek and three English food blogs. Our aim is to identify the triggering events, the types (situational, interactional or mixed) and forms (conventionalised or creative) of wishes found in the data, and the functions they perform in terms of relational work (politic or polite). Our analysis shows that the majority of wishes in Greek and English food blogs are situational. Interactional wishes are also present in the data; however, the majority of the English ones relates to the topic of the blog, i.e., the making or the consumption of a dish, whereas most Greek interactional wishes concern the addressee's well-being. Finally, mixed wishes appear much more frequently in the Greek than in the English dataset. Our findings suggest that wishes are instances of polite relational work for Greek commenters, whereas of politic behaviour for the English.
This article examines criticism in answers to reader letters in the 1880 volume of The Girl's Own Paper. The editors' responses are notable for regularly including criticism that lacks mitigation and/or contains features likely to increase the damage to the letter writers' face. I argue that these criticisms constitute a form of institutional facework, serving to establish and defend the editors' claims to both epistemic and deontic authority. Specifically, the editors position themselves as experts with the epistemic authority to issue firm verdicts, often without explanation or justification. Moreover, they claim the right to determine what kind of behavior is acceptable, an aspect of deontic authority that has not yet been discussed in depth. Finally, the editors use criticism to defend or reclaim authority when they feel it has been called into question. Through these criticisms, the editors construct an asymmetrical relationship with readers characterized by unequal rights to face protection. This data set is thus especially interesting as a source of insight into how participants (often implicitly) make claims about what kind of facework is owed to whom.
This paper examines the use of sarcastic interrogatives as a face-aggravating strategy and the contextual factors influencing their use. Through a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses of data from three distinct American English corpora, we present two key findings. First, sarcastic interrogatives function as a face-aggravating strategy by projecting a negative image of addressees through connotations, ad hoc categorization, and maxim-flouting. Such usage challenges previous research that predominantly associates sarcasm with insincere or mock politeness. Instead, results position sarcasm as a more direct and conventionalized face-threatening act in certain discourse contexts. Second, our study demonstrates that sarcastic interrogatives are more commonly employed as a face-aggravating strategy in online political debate forums, compared to spoken and unscripted TV discourse. This variation is attributed to contextual differences, including social distance, anonymity, and the likelihood of joint accomplishment in each discourse type. The findings highlight the role of discursive environments in shaping sarcastic usage, offering new insights into the relationship between sarcasm and impoliteness. Overall, our study contributes to a deeper understanding of how discursive environments shape the use of sarcasm, emphasizing its nuanced role in impoliteness and face-aggravation across varying communicative contexts.
Abstract In this study, we investigate the Kuakua (夸夸 ‘praise’) genre, an innovative internet linguistic phenomenon found on Chinese social media, using data collected from various social media platforms. We demonstrate that, different from similar speech acts of compliment/praise on English social media such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), the Kuakua genre, which takes place within internet communities, includes praise-seeking in addition to self-praising and other-praising. Adopting the motivation model of pragmatics as our analytical framework, we propose that the three types of praise in the Kuakua genre result from an intricate interplay between different motivations relating to enhancing the image/face of self and other. Specifically, the acts of self-praising and praise-seeking are motivated by the need to maintain and/or enhance self-image/face while other-praising, either as a response to praise-seeking or as a voluntary act, is motivated primarily by other-image/face and secondarily by self-image/face. These different motivations lead to different strategies, which we also discuss in considerable detail. Our paper therefore contributes to the study of language use on the Internet, politeness, and the field of pragmatics in general, for it reveals several features of praise that have not been found in the literature.
This paper analyzes whether gender affects how people respond to a refused friend request combined with an impolite private message that expresses condescension and criticism. The private message was designed to elicit a response to the face-threatening acts of request, refusal and negative impoliteness. The study adopted an explanatory mixed methods approach to analyze 120 participant responses. Firstly, Culpeper et al.'s (Culpeper, Jonathan, Derek Bousfield & Anne Wichmann. 2003. Impoliteness revisited: With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects. Journal of Pragmatics 35(10-11). 1545-1579.) model of response to the refusal options was applied to identify counter-offensive and counter-defensive responses. After that, replies were categorized according to Culpeper's (Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics 25(3). 349-367., Culpeper, Jonathan. 2005. Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show: The weakest link. Journal of Politeness Research 1(1). 35-72.) (im)politeness super-strategies and Bousfield's (Bousfield, Derek. 2007. Beginnings, middles and ends: A biopsy of the dynamics of impolite exchanges. Journal of Pragmatics 39(12). 2185-2216) defensive counterstrategies. The results show that men predominantly utilize defensive and aggressive counterstrategies, particularly mock politeness. Women, in contrast, heavily use counter defensive strategies, specifically abrogation, to deny responsibility for the triggering act. Social media is an increasingly crucial communicative tool in contemporary society, and this study provides evidence that gender-based differences can be observed in etiquette and norms on social media, which may be influenced by face-to-face dynamics. In addition, the study investigates how culture-specific expressions are discursively employed on social media to denote sarcasm or impoliteness, giving further insight into how language usage patterns may be impacted by social media.
Utilizing the Labovian-style fieldwork methodology in the form of request for directions, this research delved into the nuances of thanking responses from 16 groups of 960 Chinese respondents, by meticulously controlling four distinct variables: education level (high and low), age (aged and young), complexity of thanking expressions (complex and simple), and indebtedness (knowing and telling the direction, not knowing and failing to tell the direction). The findings reveal that: firstly, the participants' thanking responses operate within a self-contained framework, characterized by a range of pragmalinguistic forms with varying degrees of politeness and few westernized examples (returning thanks). Among them, verbally minimizing the favor constitutes approximately one fourth of the dataset, followed by verbally acknowledging the thanks and compound strategies. The non-verbal means encompass non-verbal minimizing of the favor and non-verbal acknowledgment of the thanks. Knowing/not-knowing situation-specific strategies include reinforcing the favor, returning thanks, compensating for the unmet favor, and apologizing. Secondly, the participants' education level and age are found to have a more significant impact on the participants' awareness of politeness in the thanking response realizations, whereas the regulating effects of the complexity of thanking expressions and their sense of the investigator's indebtedness to them are relatively minor. The current research further illuminates the intricate connection between politeness and speech acts, especially Chinese politeness in relation to thanking responses.
Address forms have been investigated in various social contexts in association with solidarity and power (Brown, Roger & Albert Gilman. 1960. The pronouns of power and solidarity. In Thomas Albert Sebeok (ed.), Style in language, 252-281. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). In Indo-European languages, solidarity is often linked with singular pronouns, while power is associated with plural pronouns. Anchimbe and Janney (2017. Postcolonial pragmatics. In Anne Baron, Yueguo Gu & Gerard Steen (eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics, 1st edn., 105-120. London: Routledge, Yusra et al. (2023. Borrowing of address forms for dimensions of social relation in a contact-induced multilingual community. Journal of Politeness Research 19(1). 217-248) and other studies have extended this concept to non-European communities with multi-complex social structures and relations. They found that, beyond the solidarity and power continuum, other forms of relations exist, each represented by particular address forms. This study aims to refine these concepts by observing address forms in the Sasak communities. Through ethnographic observation of communication in key community centers, the study investigates the linkage between address forms, social structures, and social relations. By interviewing key informants and recording naturally occurring conversations, the study identifies patterned links between the forms and the conditions governing them. The study provides evidence that precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Sasak societies have undergone significant changes, leading to increasingly complex social structures and relations. This complexity suggests that the binary solidarity-power concept should be revised and extended. Furthermore, the study displays the social dynamics that address forms can play within the postcolonial Sasak communities, highlighting the need for culture-specific refinement of the association between address forms and the nuanced dimensions of social relations.
This paper investigates the occurrence and structures of mitigation of directives issued during the early minutes of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest resuscitation attempts, drawing on a dialogue analysis approach based on Searle's Speech Act Theory. We transcribed the first 5 min of 40 pre-recorded, real-life resuscitation attempts. Line-by-line dialogue annotations, based on a bespoke dialogue annotation scheme, were applied to the dialogue transcripts to extract verbal orders or directives. Results revealed that directives made up about 25 % of the dialogue in these early minutes of real-life cardiac arrest resuscitation attempts. Three quarters of all directives were mitigated to an extent, forming a continuum of mitigated strategies. Some structures of mitigation carried ambiguous meanings and were found to delay target actions. The use of mitigation strategies also added length to directives, thus consuming extra time during the resuscitation attempts. Using softeners and affective terms appeared to be the best way to counterbalance the social imperative of politeness, with the communicative pressure of optimal efficiency.
In the second-wave, research on (im)politeness has experienced a discursive turn that witnesses an increasing interest in the naturally occurring and situated discourse. Although numerous researchers have evaluated interactional orientation of (im)politeness via a wide range of pragmatic phenomena, few studies have probed the dynamic characteristics and pragmatic functions of (im)politeness in discourse generated in children’s daily communication, such as parent–child discourse in family mealtimes. Based on the discourse between Chinese preschool children and their caregivers, the current study addresses the internal characteristics of (im)politeness by exploring how force dynamics can be formed and mediated in family mealtimes through the lens of dinner table rituals. Furthermore, the pragmatic functions of (im)politeness were revealed from the ritual perspective, namely, enhancing language socialization, expressing emotions, indicating meaningful educational directions, and guiding children’s moral practice. Utilizing force dynamics of (im)politeness, the current study aims to provide new insights for the understanding of children’s (im)politeness and emphasize the critical place that ritual occupies in (im)politeness research.
This article focuses on the recent pronoun-sharing practice (in bio signatures or interactions) and demonstrates the need to apprehend the trend within a pragmatic framework. Basing her analysis on a questionnaire and extracts from the web via SketchEngine, the author shows that the different evaluations of the phenomenon cover the whole spectrum from politeness to impoliteness theory. Pronoun sharers evince what she calls “inclusive politeness” by paying attention to others’ face needs. Rejecters consider the practice an impingement on their sociality rights. What they regard as an impolite act towards them in turn justifies their opting out of inclusive politeness. The author then evinces that there is a middle-ground attitude between these two opposed perspectives. Some people may not consider themselves allies to the cause and yet opt for the correct pronoun out of “civility”, which can be either genuine or “virtue-signalling”. The article proposes to see pronoun sharing as a preemptive act aimed at avoiding the damaging act of misgendering, and assesses the cost such a practice entails and to whom. It finally advocates for a Critical Politeness Theory, acknowledging the subjective position of the researcher and their critical third-order perspective on matters of consideration for fellow human beings.
In their endeavor to theorize impoliteness from a Levinasian perspective, Xie and Fan (2024. Theorizing impoliteness: A Levinasian perspective. Journal of Politeness Research 20(1). 157–181) have recently proposed the concept of the ethics of impoliteness. In this paper, I seek to conceptualize these ethics in terms of power in a broader sense. I argue that (1) impoliteness, as the exercise of power, is ethical when it is employed not to ridicule, insult, threaten or dominate the other, or control the other’s action, but to defend one’s individuality, call for respect and understanding, and ultimately to ensure dialogue on equal terms, (2) as mundane communicative practice, it is arguably more substantial and instrumental than politeness in negotiating individual difference, reshaping human character and transforming social relationships, and (3) when it is employed to challenge, interrupt, or transcend an existing power relation, the efforts of both members of an interactive dyad are required if equality in communication is to be achieved. I then apply this perspective to excerpts from a literary classic, namely, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice , in order to explore in what sense impoliteness is ethical and in what sense it is not.
The aim of this research was to identify whether the ritual frame indicating expression (RFIE) please was used by Thai intermediate-level learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in requests in intercultural communication, as well as to determine whether the Thai intermediate-level EFL learners used any RFIEs in requests in intercultural communication. Dyadic and multiparty academic discussions between Thai university students and American university lecturers were collected, as well as those between university students who spoke English as their first language (L1) and the American university lecturers to enable a comparison. The results revealed that the RFIE please was used at a low frequency by a limited number of Thai university students, indicating that the requestive please cannot be considered an RFIE that the Thai student participants used in requests in intercultural communication. Moreover, the Thai university students used three RFIEs, namely “teacher”, “ajarn”, and the modal verb “can”. The Thai university students mainly used these three RFIEs due to politeness norms in Thai culture, which led to these three RFIEs being used extensively with speech-act heaviness. Accordingly, over-politeness was identified in the use of these three RFIEs in intercultural communication.
According to the literature on impoliteness and political incivility, the evaluation of a transgressive communicative act depends on the context of the speech, the characteristics of the speaker and the audience, and many other factors. This paper examines how the socio-demographic background of a high school girl – who gave a profanity-laden public speech aimed at the political leaders of the country – can influence the evaluation as well as the discursive sanctions. Discursive sanctioning is conceptualized as the verbal proposal of retribution, describing the negative consequences the transgressor should endure. This research employs the methodology of frame analysis to investigate comments written by citizens in response to news media articles shared on Facebook, then creates a typology of discursive sanctions ranging from benign and constructive to harsh and destructive. Results show that age is a more prominent factor influencing the evaluation than gender, even though swearing is usually associated with young people. Results also show the overwhelming support of commenters; however, discursive sanctions include severe age- and gender-specific punishments.
Academic interest in impoliteness within political interactions has grown, but there remains a significant gap in the exploration of Chinese political discourse, let alone understanding how and why multiple participants perceive and respond to this phenomenon. Moreover, metaphor, as a crucial off-record strategy in impoliteness research, has not been given in-depth scrutiny by pragmaticists. To address the gaps, we collected 228 Chinese diplomatic press conference texts, and interviewed 27 Chinese citizens to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze external journalists’ face-threatening impoliteness and public understandings and retorts, in comparison with Chinese spokespersons’ measures of counter-impoliteness. It is found that first, the journalists’ impoliteness primarily consists of explicit negative association, seeking disagreement, and threatening/frightening. Second, the interviewees’ evaluation of impoliteness is influenced by their background knowledge, collective identity, political stances, and attention to the journalists’ querying manners. Third, the spokespersons use 11 types of deliberate metaphors along with other negative evaluations such as denials and rhetorical questions. Apart from these devices, the interviewees’ responses abound with distinct outpourings of other-condemning sentiment. The multiple recipients’ judgments and rebuttals may interrelate with their discoursal and social roles, which are arguably affected by China’s contemporary diplomacy and nationals’ mentalities.
