This paper investigates linguistic and non-linguistic markers of negative evaluations of situated behaviours, termed impoliteness (Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011. Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. In Drew Paul, Marjorie H. Goodwin, John J. Gumpertz & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), Studies in interactional linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The paper takes an interactional pragmatic approach to a fixed institutional setting (a courtroom) to investigate how (not why) a series of reprimands and sanctions unfolded. It shows that the key participants, the judge and the defendant, orient to separate interactional cues from their unshared overhearing audiences (their unshared contexts), whilst orienting to each other's institutional interaction turns (their shared context). This paper suggests that their contexts create competing architectures of intersubjectivity, termed duelling contexts, because the participants are not co-locative (in separate rooms connected through closed circuit TV).

This paper examines how Asian speakers of English as a lingua franca employ self-denigration as a relational strategy (i.e. contributing to the ongoing management of interpersonal relationships) in talk-in-interaction. The study applies a protocol informed by conversation analysis to illuminate the relational functions of self-denigration and the prosodic and paralinguistic features that help to accomplish these. The data indicate that self-denigration in the ACE corpus tends to occur in informal, non-role-assigning, non-task-focused interactions. It may present as a first-turn stand-alone utterance, or as a precursor to a speaker's positive self-evaluation, where it serves a downplaying function. It also occurs as a second turn in response to an interlocutor's praise, criticism, or neutral statement. In terms of its relational functions, self-denigration may perform a face-saving, face-maintaining, or even face-enhancing role for the producer and/or other interlocutors. It may also be employed to generate shared humour, promoting a sense of in-group solidarity among the participants. Finally, it may perform a socially moderating function – particularly in reaction to a praising utterance – wherein a speaker uses self-denigration to appear modest rather than inappropriately vain. Several such functions may be served simultaneously.

In recent years, significant momentum has built up in efforts to integrate the social with the cognitive in theoretical models of speech production/processing and phonological representation. While acknowledging these advances, we argue that what limits our ability to elaborate models of processing and representation in which social-indexical properties of speech are effectively integrated is that we remain some way from fully understanding how these properties are manifested within spoken interaction in the first place. We explore some of these limitations, drawing on data from a study of sociophonetic variability in a population of speakers of Australian English. We discuss issues relating to methods for capturing variability in the realization of vowels and consonants, and we highlight the pivotal role of speech style and the challenges that this raises for models of production and processing.

This paper reports on an exploratory study of the application of different types of analysis method to the characterization of the acoustic properties of vowel realization in the performance of speakers of West Australian English (West AusE). Tense monophthongs and diphthongs produced in a word list by 18 speakers of West AusE were analysed using three different methods, two static and one dynamic. Results differ across the three methods with the dynamic analysis yielding substantially more detail and differentiation between and within vowel categories. Our findings enhance knowledge of a variety which has received scant attention in existing phonetic studies of AusE, and more generally contribute to the on-going discussion in the literature about which approach to acoustic analysis provides the best means of capturing the properties of vowel realization and variability.

Abstract It is now well recognized that the recipients’ evaluations need to be given serious consideration when theorizing impoliteness. Yet despite the importance placed on evaluations by recipients, the role of the recipient in interaction has been reduced through theorizing within the field to the ascribing of (perceived) intentions or interpreting of (perceived) social norms and expectations. We suggest, in this paper, that this under-theorizes the role of the recipient vis-à-vis evaluations of impoliteness. Building on an account of (im)politeness as social practice (Haugh 2013b, 2015; Kádár and Haugh 2013), we argue that evaluations of impoliteness inevitably involve those recipients construing the speaker’s action as a particular kind of social action, and holding them accountable for that particular kind of social action with respect to particular dimension(s) of the moral order (Haugh 2013a, 2015). The accountability of social action is underpinned, in part, by the presumed agency of participants. Agency involves the socially mediated capacity to act that is afforded through 1. knowing one has the ability to act, 2. knowing that these actions may affect others (and self), and 3. knowing that one will thus be held accountable for those actions (Ahearn 2001; Duranti 2004; Mitchell forthcoming). We argue that a focus on agency in theorizing impoliteness allows for the ways in which recipients do not just simply invoke social norms or (in some cases at least) perceived speaker intentions in evaluating talk or conduct as impolite, but may also exercise their own agency in construing the speaker’s actions as a particular kind of action, and thus as offensive or not. It is concluded that the agency exercised by recipients with respect to the degree to which they hold speakers accountable for impolite or offensive stances needs to be examined more carefully in theorizing about (im)politeness more generally.

This paper addresses particular social actions present in a data set of short message emails where interactants use potentially impolite strategies frequently. The particular social action under analysis here is that of goading, a term coined to describe targeted banter (banter directed toward a ratified participant in interaction). However, evaluations of impoliteness are not always shared across participants in these goading sequences, as follow-up interviews show some disaffiliation between individual participants’ understanding of the prior turns. It is more common in this data set to find tokens of goading being evaluated as non-impolite rather than impolite, suggesting that participants perceive the humorous nature of goading. Yet, among a tiny community of practice of only four individuals, even these non-impolite evaluations are not always shared. This paper attempts to add to the empirical study of im/politeness to account for goading as a type of banter or jocular mockery and situate it in the ever-increasing set of actions which cannot be straightforwardly categorized as second-order politeness or as impoliteness.