Analysis The Pragmatic Strategies And Functions Of Verbal Impoliteness From The Aspect Of Impoliteness Theory

Since Brown&Levinson (1978/1987), Leech (1983) proposed the politenesstheory, the research on politeness phenomena has become one of the focuses of thepragmatics and social linguistics. Then, politeness becomes one of the mostsignificant parts of pragmatics. So far, a number of books and papers about politenessresearch have been published. However, language, as a main means used by humanbeings to communicate, not only constitutes polite expressions, but also impolite ones.According to the current study, there are many theories like Brown&Levinson’s(1978/1987) Face-saving Theory (FST), Leech’s (1983) Politeness Principle (PP),which are used to analyze and explain politeness. Nevertheless, these politenesstheories, to some extent, cannot explain the impoliteness phenomena under certaincontext, so we need a new model to illustrate and analyze. In1996, Culpeperproposed an impoliteness model which parallels to Brown&Levinson’s politenesstheory. In2008, Bousfield published a book of Impoliteness in Interaction, meanwhile,Bousfield and Locher co-edited a book of Impoliteness in Language: Studies on itsInterplay with Power in Theory and Practice. These two books fill the gaps of nobooks in impoliteness study and make a great contribution to perfect the politenessstudy and pragmatic theory. Thus, the year of2008has been dubbed by Sifianou as“The Year of Impoliteness” in2010.On the basis of the impoliteness theory, this paper continues to explore the verbalimpoliteness phenomena which conclude:(1) to analyze and discuss the impolitenessphenomena, then supplement and perfect the impoliteness strategies (IS for short)under impoliteness superstrategies;(2) to explore its pragmatic functions.The data this paper collected are from American sitcom The Big Bang Theory.This sitcom tells a story about a girl and four scientists and now it has been updated tothe sixth season. In order to highlight the antagonistic impoliteness language, thewriters Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady arrange the impoliteness language in an artful way,thus in some degree, the language reflects the real life of “Scientific Genius”, the indoors man. Therefore, for the study’s convenience, this paper selects the first5seasons which include111episodes as my corpus.The major findings of this paper are as follows:(1) most strategies, especially thestrategy “put the other’s indebtedness on record” from Culpeper (1996) not realized inthe previous corpus has found in this data;(2) meanwhile, the other five impolitenessstrategies that are not covered in the previous study, namely: talking about the other’srelatives, especially elder female; exposing someone’s weakness; imitating the other’svoice; talking about the target’s religion; and echoing are explored in this paper;(3)the pragmatic functions of the impoliteness language are as follows: on the one hand,from the perspective of the interactants, it has expressive function and directivefunction; on the other hand, from the spectator’s view, it has recreational function.Pitifully, five strategies like “withhold politeness” have not been realized in this paper.