On Verbal Impoliteness In Chinese Language

Impoliteness, as the contradictory of politeness, is a common phenomenon in verbal communication. For all importance sociolinguistics and pragmatics attach to the study of the latter, people rarely notice the necessity to carry out a study on the former. Therefore, this research makes a special study focused exclusively on verbal impoliteness from the pragmatic perspective with Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory as the theoretical foundation. The main purpose is to find out the root cause for the emergence of various impolite phenomena through a better understanding of them, and in this way provide theoretical basis and practical assistance to the discovery of fundamental ways to solve the problem of impoliteness.Based on a working definition of verbal impoliteness, this study begins with a delimitation and classification of it from the following three aspects step by step: ways of realization, targets of impoliteness, and the speaker's intention and its perception by the hearer. After that, the study objects of this research are fixed on three most common impolite phenomena, i.e. non-strategic impoliteness, strategic impoliteness and impoliteness due to pragmatic failures, falling respectively into two categories with the first two being impoliteness both intended and perceived and the rest one that not intended but perceived mistakenly.In the major part of this study, the impolite issue is addressed in three steps, solving three main problems in turn: how do utterances convey impoliteness; what kind of utterances can convey impoliteness; and how does the speaker construct the utterance conveying impoliteness? The first problem is dealt with the proposal of a negotiation model for dynamic generation of impolite meaning in accordance with the negotiable nature of language. The existence of the second problem is decided by linguistic variability, the solution of which is in essence a generalization and summary of those expressive modes and manifestation means of impoliteness, representing the resource for the speaker to make choices in the construction of verbal impoliteness. The research reaches its final aim along with the settlement of the third problem. Since Verschueren's adaptation model of contextual correlates shows its deficiency in applying to the case of...