Culpeper’s Impoliteness Strategies in Neil Simon’s ‘Biloxi Blues’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.13.2023.09Keywords:
Culpeper’s impoliteness strategies, Biloxi Blues, face, dramatic text, face-threatening acts, Neil SimonAbstract
Impoliteness has recently been of interest to scholars as a linguistic study in the field of pragmatics. It has emerged as the opposite orientation to politeness strategy, theory and studies. This paper explores how the impoliteness strategies mapped out by Jonathan Culpeper (1996) are employed in dramatic texts. It examines Culpeper’s impoliteness strategies designed to investigate face in the dramatic text. This paper tests the strategies through Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues (1985). This dramatic comedy is used for three reasons: (1) as a drama, it is a mirror of life and real-life speech events; (2) impoliteness strategies provide a resource to analyse impolite interactions between the characters in dialogic discourse; (3) dramatic texts provide a rich context to interpret and analyse verbal and non-verbal impoliteness strategies. Impoliteness strategies can cause disharmony and conflict between characters in a dramatic text. The interactions exchanged by the characters in Biloxi Blues are analysed according to Culpeper’s five impoliteness strategies: bald on record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness, sarcasm or mock politeness, and withhold politeness. This study employs a descriptive qualitative method to determine how face-threatening acts are incorporated into the play in line with Culpeper’s impoliteness strategies propounded in his article entitled Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness (1996). The paper also examines how the characters react to face-threatening acts. In the twelve selected dramatic extracts, seventeen cases of positive impoliteness, ten cases of bald on record impoliteness, eight cases of sarcasm or mock politeness, and four cases of negative impoliteness have been observed. Moreover, it has also been observed that the characters use taboo words and abusive and strong language. The bald on record impolite acts are aggravated mainly by abuses, sexual insults and name-calling strategies. Racial slurs have also been identified as a part of positive impoliteness.
References
Berkowitz, M. G. (2013) American Drama of the Twentieth Century. NY: Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315846729
Birner, J. B. (2013) Introduction to Pragmatics. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Bousfield, D. (2008) Impoliteness in Interaction. Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.167
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987) Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511813085
Brown, R. and Albert, G. (1989) Politeness theory and Shakespeare’s four major tragedies. Language in Society, 18 (2): 159-212. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500013464
Culpeper, J. (2011) Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975752
Culpeper, J. (2011) Politeness and impoliteness. In K. Aijmer and G. Andersen (eds.) Sociopragmatics, Vol. 5 of Handbooks of Pragmatics (pp. 391-436). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Culpeper, J. (2005) Impoliteness and entertainment in television quiz show: The Weakest Link. Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture, 1: 35-72. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jplr.2005.1.1.35
Culpeper, J. (1996) Towards an anatomy of impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 25: 349-367. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(95)00014-3
Farneste, M. (2013) What is the meaning of the school/university essay and related terms in English and Latvian? Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, 3: 33-45. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.03.2013.03
Fraser, B. and William N. (1981) The association of deference with linguistic form. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 27: 93-109. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.1981.27.93
Goffman, E. (1967) On face-work. An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction. In E. Goffman (ed.) Interaction Ritual: essays in face-to-face behaviour (pp. 5-45). New York: Doubleday. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203788387-2
Grice, H. P. (1975) Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41-58). New York: Academic Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368811_003
Karapetjana, I. and Rozina, G. (2012) Politeness strategies in electronic communication: the speech act of request. Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, 2: 63-71. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22364/BJELLC.02.2012.06
Lakoff, R. T. (1989) The limits of politeness: therapeutic and courtroom discourse. Multilingua, 8 (2-3): 101-129. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/mult.1989.8.2-3.101
Leech, G. (2014) Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Locher, M. A. and Derek B. (2008) Introduction: impoliteness and power in language. In D. Bousfield and M. A. Locher (eds.) Impoliteness in Language: Studies on its Interplay with Power in Theory and Practice (pp. 1-13). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110208344.0.1
Simon, N. (1986) Biloxi Blues. New York: Samuel French.
Tedeschi, J. T. and Richard, B. F. (1994) Violence, Aggression, and Coercive Actions. Washington DC: American Psychological Association. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/10160-000
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 University of Latvia
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
