Abstract
This chapter maps out the space occupied by phenomena that do not belong to either politeness or impoliteness, but in some sense fit both. It focuses on mixed or mismatching interpersonal messages that are incongruous on at least one level of interpretation or generate a sense of interpretive or evaluative dissonance. They encompass phenomena that typically attract labels such as sarcasm, banter and teasing. The authors discuss the pragmatic background of such mixed messages, especially drawing on approaches to irony, how they figure in classic politeness theories, and, in particular, how they work. This part of the chapter considers their metapragmatics, the constituents of the ‘mix’ of messages, how particular ‘mixes’ become conventionalised, their functions and also how they are perceived.
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Notes
- 1.
The literature (e.g. Gibbs 1986; Kreuz and Glucksberg 1989; Pexman and Olineck 2002) uses the terms ‘ironic compliments’ and ‘ironic insults’, where the head nouns, compliment or insult, denote the ironic message. To the uninitiated, they can easily be erroneously understood in the opposite way: an ironic compliment has the literal message of a compliment but the implied message of an insult (e.g. Grice’s ‘What a fine friend you are!’); an ironic insult, on the other hand, has the reverse, the literal message of an insult but the implied message of a compliment. In an attempt to make the meaning of the literature more transparent, we will adopt the terms ‘complimentary insults’ and ‘insulting compliments’. These terms make transparent the interpersonal mix of messages.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
A second-order principle is thus not to be confused with the use of that term elsewhere in the (im)politeness and pragmatics literature; with Leech, it denotes a second level of interpretation in which the first level of interpretation is embedded.
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- 6.
Interestingly, Plester and Sayers’s (2007) study of the functions of banter shows that ‘the higher the status the less banter that was used and instigated’ (p. 182).
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- 8.
Later on the same day Luke said: ‘I believe in having an argument or a confrontation in private.’
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Culpeper, J., Haugh, M., Sinkeviciute, V. (2017). (Im)politeness and Mixed Messages. In: Culpeper, J., Haugh, M., Kádár, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37508-7_13
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