Impoliteness in Media Discourse (Interfaces)

260 Pages·2017·2.659 MB·English

by  Anna Baczkowska (editor)

5 I n t e r f a c e s
The book presents the issue of impoliteness in media discourse found
in television debates, films and computer-mediated communication.
Studies in Language,
The phenomenon is viewed from different theoretical perspectives,
namely prosody studies, corpus linguistics, media studies and audio- Mind and Translation
visual translation, neo-Gricean approaches, reception-oriented investi-
gations and context-bound interpretations. Authors from ten different Edited by Anna Bączkowska
countries – Sweden, USA, Norway, New Zealand, Mexico, Georgia,
France, Poland, India, and UAE – analyse data from nine languages –
English, Swedish, Georgian, Polish, Arabic, Persian, French, Croatian and
Montenegrin.
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Anna Bączkowska is associate professor of linguistics at Kazimierz Wiel- o
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mantics, pragmatics, translation studies, psycholinguistics and applied ą
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www.peterlang.com ISBN 978-3-631-64510-9
INFA 05_264510_Baczkowska_VH_A5HC PLE.indd 1 08.03.17 KW 10 11:25
5 I n t e r f a c e s
The book presents the issue of impoliteness in media discourse found
in television debates, films and computer-mediated communication.
Studies in Language,
The phenomenon is viewed from different theoretical perspectives,
namely prosody studies, corpus linguistics, media studies and audio- Mind and Translation
visual translation, neo-Gricean approaches, reception-oriented investi-
gations and context-bound interpretations. Authors from ten different Edited by Anna Bączkowska
countries – Sweden, USA, Norway, New Zealand, Mexico, Georgia,
France, Poland, India, and UAE – analyse data from nine languages –
English, Swedish, Georgian, Polish, Arabic, Persian, French, Croatian and
Montenegrin.
e
s
r
u
o
c
s
Di
a
di
e
M
n
s i
s
e
n
e
t
oli
p
m
) · I Anna Bączkowska (ed.)
d.
e
(
a
k Impoliteness in
s
w
Anna Bączkowska is associate professor of linguistics at Kazimierz Wiel- o
k
ki University in Bydgoszcz (Poland). Her research interests include se- z
c Media Discourse
mantics, pragmatics, translation studies, psycholinguistics and applied ą
B
linguistics. She is the editor of Linguistics Applied and two book series. a
n
n
A
www.peterlang.com
INFA 05_264510_Baczkowska_VH_A5HC PLE.indd 1 08.03.17 KW 10 11:25
Impoliteness in Media Discourse
Interfaces

Studies in Language,
Mind and Translation
Edited by Anna Bączkowska

Advisory Board
Jorge Díaz Cintas (University College London, England)
Marlene Johansson Falck (Umeå University, Sweden)
Dániel Kádár (University of Huddersfield, England)
Stanisław Puppel (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)
Janusz Trempała (Kazimierz Wielki University, Poland)

Vol. 5
Anna Bączkowska (ed.)

Impoliteness in
Media Discourse
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the
Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is
available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bączkowska, Anna, 1968- editor.
Title: Impoliteness in media discourse / Anna Bączkowska (ed.).
Description: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang, [2015] | Series:
Interfaces ; Vol. 5
Identifiers: LCCN 2015000913| ISBN 9783631645109 (print) | ISBN 9783653035117
(e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Politeness (Linguistics) | Grammar, Comparative and
general—Honorific. | Discourse analysis—Social aspects. | Mass
media—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC P299.H66 I47 2015 | DDC 401/.41—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015000913

This publication was financially supported
by the Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz.

ISSN 2195-3368
ISBN 978-3-631-64510-9 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-653-03511-7 (E-Book)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-69367-4 (EPUB)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-69368-1 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-03511-7

© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Frankfurt am Main 2017
All rights reserved.

Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH.

Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙
Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any
utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to
prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions,
translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in
electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
www.peterlang.com
Table of Contents

Åsa Abelin
Impolite prosody in Swedish and the importance of context………………………………13

Daniel Ginsberg
‘If you can’t share the road, then find yourself some other planet’: …
Impoliteness in a corpus of newspaper blog comments …………………………………..27

Ljiljana Šari(cid:252) and Tatjana Radanovi(cid:252) Felberg
Realizations and functions of impoliteness in discourse about language and identity
in Croatian and Montenegrin media……………………………………………………....49

Elizabeth Riddle and Mai Kuha
Rude Language in Personal Apologies for a Political Event…………………………..…77

Kieran A. File
‘That was a bit daft though, wasn’t it?’ Strategic use of impoliteness in a post-match
media interview…………………………………………………………………………..107

Gerrard Mugford
Face Attacks, offence and plastic Brits: intentional British media impoliteness…….…127

Manana Rusieshvili-Cartledge
Face-attack in Georgian political discourse. Using examples from TV debates
between female politicians during the pre-election campaign for the Parliamentary
elections of 2012…………………………………………………………………………141

Célia Schneebeli
Impoliteness in the ‘casse-toi pauv’ con’ incident: a discursive case-study…………….161

Iwona Benenowska
Impoliteness in the media and its reception…………………………………………..…179

Marzieh Bashirpour and S. Imtiaz Hasnain
Spread of impoliteness through media in the societyCase in Iranian serial
Qahveye Talkh (Bitter Coffee) ………………………………………………….………207

Sattar Izwaini
Translation of Taboo Expressions in Arabic Subtitling……………………………….…237

Preface
The book presents the problem of impoliteness in media discourse seen from
several perspectives – prosody studies, corpus linguistics, neo-Gricean
pragmatics, media studies, audiovisual translation – and found in a number of
contexts, such as television debates, films, political and social events, and sport
events; computer-mediated communication being the main source of data for
most authors. The studies presented in the volume are extracted from data
coming from nine languages (English, Swedish, Georgian, Polish, Arabic,
Persian, French, Croatian and Montenegrin), and are discussed by authors from
ten countries (Sweden, USA, Norway, United Kingdom, Mexico, Georgia,
France, Poland, India, and UAE). Neo-Gricean approaches to impoliteness and
rudeness, reception-oriented investigation and context-bound interpretations of
impoliteness are the predominant approaches which run through the entire
volume.
In essence, several thematic groups emerge from the papers. The first two
contributions (Åsa Abelin, Daniel Ginsberg) are corpus-based studies of
impoliteness. They are followed by three chapters which touch upon the
problem of identity (Ljiljana Šari(cid:252) and Tatjana Radanovi(cid:252) Felberg, Elisabeth M.
Riddle and Mai Kuna, Kieran A. File). The last paper in this thematic group and
the subsequent account (Gerrard Mugford) used reports of sports events as a
source of data for analysis. One paper is devoted to a gender-related discussion
of impoliteness (Manana Rusieshvili-Cartledge) and it draws on material
illustrating political discourse, which is also the context examined by two
subsequent texts (Célia Schneebeli, Iwona Benenowska). Finally, the articles
which close the volume focus on impoliteness encountered in DVD and
television films (Marzieh Bashirpour and S. Imtiaz Hasnain, Sattar Izwaini).
The volume opens with a contribution by Åsa Abelin (University of
Gothenburg, Sweden), who looks into the under-investigated problem of the role
of emotional-attitudinal prosody in impoliteness studies. The examination of
material gleaned from a television debate corpus allows her to observe that
impoliteness cannot be studied in isolation from context. In particular, prosodic
features (loudness, pitch of voice, speech tempo, overlapping speech, etc.)
should be taken into account, as a significant bulk of information is latent in
these, and should be analyzed against a benchmark of acoustic patterns
established for individual speakers. Premising her work on a corpus-based study,
she defines the concept of impoliteness as seen by the Swedish. The concept of
8

impoliteness is identified with the use of foul language, acts leading to the
violation of interaction conventions (e.g. interruptions, not listening, not saying
“thank you”, etc.), and prosodic traits.
Daniel Ginsberg (Georgetown University, USA) offers a statistical study of
impoliteness in computer-mediated communication in line with Conrad’s (2002)
approach to corpus-based studies of discourse and Locher’s (2006) discursive
approach to politeness. His investigation is reception-oriented and centres on
how both the researcher himself as well as anonymous survey respondents
elicited from among Internet users evaluate the markedness of im/politeness in
texts found on newsblogs devoted to im/polite behavior of drivers vs. cyclists.
The analysis is based on a purpose-built corpus which was annotated for
markedness, degree of politeness and appropriateness of judgments. His study
clearly shows that impoliteness is closely allied with the construction of group
identity (drivers vs. cyclists). On a more specific note, the author proves that
driver-aligned posts are usually other-oriented (i.e. anti-cyclist) complaints,
while cyclist-aligned posts tend to be same-group-directed and face-neutral.
Ljiljana Šari(cid:252) and Tatjana Radanovi(cid:252) Felberg (University of Oslo, Oslo
and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway) zoom in on the
interplay between the language of impoliteness and identity construction in the
Croatian and Montenegrin media. In a macro context, the Authors analyze the
specific discourse which appeared after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Specifically,
they focus on language found on Internet forums as well as in online and print
newspapers, and they examine discussions about “the others”, i.e. Serbs, in
terms of the following categories: use of inappropriate personality markers,
personalized negative assertions, sarcasm and mock politeness. The study shows
that the texts under inspection are illustrative of highly context-dependent and
non-conventionalized impoliteness. Moreover, identity-ascribing means
employed by different Communities of Practice can be indicative of political
preferences, being in this case either pro-Serbian or pro-Montenegrin.
The article by Elizabeth Riddle and Mai Kuha (Ball State University,
USA) addresses the issue of rudeness in political context manifest in postings on
an Internet site devoted to presidential elections. Contrary to what might be
expected, the authors find instances of rude language in contexts which are more
typical of polite behaviour, namely in apologies. Taboo terms, disparaging
expressions and hate language can be found in the sample of almost 2000
apologies studied by the authors and analyzed in line with the discursive
approach to (im)politeness. Interestingly, the authors argue that in the contexts