Mock Politeness In Political Office Interaction

Scholars in and abroad have made wide range of studies on language politeness and impoliteness, including systematic theoretical studies and various empirical studies. In (im)politeness researches, some scholars have briefly mentioned mock politeness. Instead of being regarded as a subordinate type of politeness or impoliteness, this paper holds that mock politeness is an independent language phenomenon. Through the combined use of politeness theories and impoliteness expressions in communication, mock politeness is an effective discourse strategy under specific contexts.This paper sets out to study the language phenomenon of mock politeness in daily office political language, and tries to sort out realization modes and pragmatic functions of mock politeness used in political office interaction.Mock politeness in political office interaction is examined through a case study of House of Cards, an American political TV series. The study is done with the method of literature research, the combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, and data exemplification. Based on Leech’s Politeness Principle, Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory and Spencer-Oatey’s Rapport Management Theory, this research is carried out by collecting and analyzing mock politeness speech acts in thirteen episodes of House of Cards Season One. Each realization mode and pragmatic function of mock politeness is illustrated with several pieces of conversation extracted from House of Cards.The results show that in political office interaction, mock politeness is realized by modes of "iron fist in a velvet glove", "token empathy" and "allusion", among which "token empathy" is the most frequently used one. The research also finds that the use of mock politeness in political office interaction can help construct the speaker’s identity and maintain interpersonal rapport, at the same time, mock politeness can pose threats and challenges to the hearer’s face and power. Moreover, the data shows that the different realization modes may be used together within one piece of communication, and sometimes a mock politeness speech act may have more than one pragmatic function.The study of mock politeness reveals the relativity of politeness and impoliteness, which may help reconstruct people’s concept of language (im)politeness. It’s hoped that mock politeness be regarded as an independent language phenomenon and included in a single theoretical framework of language (im)politeness study.