Impoliteness and threat responses

Abstract The topic of impoliteness/rudeness has become increasingly popular as an object of linguistic investigation in recent years (cf. Culpeper, 1996 , Bousfield, 2008a , Bousfield and Locher, 2008 , Bousfield and Culpeper, 2008 ). In this paper, impoliteness is viewed as an intentional form of face-aggravation caused by verbal and nonverbal means and interactively construed in a particular context. This paper contributes towards the research field on aggravating forms of social behavior by looking at a particular type of face-threatening strategy, viz. verbal threats and their immediate (elicited) responses. First, threats are analyzed from a theoretical perspective to reveal their function and use in interaction, and to show their status in existing models of impoliteness. It is argued that a threat uttered in a conditional form stresses the urgency to comply on the part of the addressee because s/he is confronted with two undesirable actions. The conditional form includes the speaker's (implicit) injunction (“If you do(n’t do) X”) as well as the prediction of possible consequences in case of non-compliance (“I will (not) do Y”). Sometimes a compliance response seems to be ‘the lesser of two evils’, indicating that the addressee is able to tolerate the threat (even against his/her own will) and acquiesce to the threatener's demands (cf. Culpeper, 1996 ). On the other hand, the target of the threat may dispute the implicit accusation or even openly challenge the coerced circumstances, which will increase the conflict rather than bring it closer to a resolution (cf. Bousfield, 2007b ). Using data from a Discourse Completion Test, this form of conflict behavior is then empirically investigated from the addressee's point of view. To this end, responses to threats were elicited and subsequently classified in order to find out how addressees perceived this ‘face-threatening act’ ( Brown and Levinson, 1987 ), and whether their responses revealed any tendency about the outcome of a particular conflict situation.