On The Responses To Impolite Utterances

The phenomena of impoliteness are very common in communication, and are even more outstanding in some discourses. Foreign scholars did not pay more attention to this phenomena until 1970's and 1980's. This thesis attempts to study responses to impolite utterances in term of conversation analysis, and tries to explore the motivation for the different types of responses. Tsui's framework of conversational structure indicates that response includes positive response and negative response. Positive response means that the addressee supports the addresser's pragmatic presupposition; negative response means that the addressee challenges the addresser's pragmatic presupposition. Goffman states that social norms and individual's ideology can greatly influence turn-taking in conversational structure. That is to say, these factors can influence response.This thesis chooses Shakespeare's Hamlet as the source. Shakespeare's plays are the world's classic and the language is rich and lively which make the study worth a while."Hamlet"is one of the four tragedies with a great number of impolite utterances. And Liang Shiqiu's Chinese translation is employed in order to guarantee the right understanding of the text.In terms of whether accepting the face attack or not, this thesis classifies response to impolite utterances into accepting and countering. Countering can be further divided into offensive countering and defensive countering. Through the data analysis, accepting includes agreement, apology and promise; offensive countering includes interrupting, satirizing, ridiculing and criticizing; defensive countering includes explaining, topic-switching and ignoring the face attack. The author further expounds the motivation for these different types of responses from function, power and mental state aspects. As functional aspect, the author explores from the following two aspects: emotion vented function and identity confirmed function. When people are hurt or their face attacked, they can use certain utterances to vent or release their emotion; and people can use certain utterances to confirm their individual characteristics, social roles and relationship of their social roles. This thesis provides a new perspective for impoliteness study. The study of response to impolite utterances includes many factors, such as context, gender, mental state and so on. If the hearer can grasp these factors well and fully understand the speaker's intention, the hearer can make a right response at the right time and avoid the unnecessary conflict, which may enable people to enjoy harmony in their study or work.