The Construction Of A Counter-politeness Model And Its Application To Dramatic Discourse

Politeness has always been a core area of studies in pragmatics. There iscountless literature on politeness research at home and abroad. However, littleattention has been paid to the studies of impoliteness. In fact, impoliteness is also acommon phenomenon in human interaction. The conflicts in literary works go hand inhand with verbal impoliteness. This is especially true in dramatic discourse.Compared with the other genres of literature, drama has been the least studied ineither literary criticism or stylistics. Since there are not sufficient studies on dramaticdialogues within the framework of pragmatic theories and the existing impolitenesstheories still need improvement, this paper defines and classifies a new term—counter-politeness—for the opposite of politeness based on the impolitenesstheories from Bousfield (2008) and Rudanko (2006) and thereafter analyzes thediscourse of William Shakespeare s drama Much Ado About Nothing by employingthe improved impoliteness model, with the aim to enrich and expand the concept ofpoliteness/impoliteness theory and validate the feasibility of this new model.The present study deals with the categorization of the counter-polite utterances,i.e. impoliteness and under-politeness. The latter is subcategorized into unintentionalimpoliteness, implied impoliteness, mock politeness and withhold politeness in termsof the speaker s intentionality. The model s validity has also been testified inShakespeare s drama Much Ado About Nothing. Through the analysis of the scenarioof Much Ado About Nothing within the framework of the new model, it is found thatthe use of counter-polite speech can enrich the image of the characters, push forwardthe development of the plot, and bring about funny effects of the comedy.This paper attempts to shed light on the application of impoliteness theories todramatic dialogues, as well as to enhance a further understanding of Much Ado AboutNothing. Therefore, this study conforms to the new trend in the prospect of aninterdisciplinary study by combining linguistics and literature.