A Functional Study Of Impoliteness In Constructing Identity

The study of impoliteness has been a hot spot of linguistics in recent years.Researches about impoliteness appear an interdisciplinary tendency,including pragmatics,sociolinguistics,sociology and social psychology.Most of the researches focus on the definition,production and realization of impoliteness,while few studies pay attention to the function of impoliteness.The paper defines the term "impoliteness" from the functional point of view.Under some specific circumstances,those speeches that damage the hearer’s face can be called impoliteness,no matter what the form of the speech is.Impoliteness can be further classified into two kinds:congruent impoliteness and metaphorical impoliteness.Congruent impoliteness refers to the impoliteness that has the consistent form and meaning,while metaphorical impoliteness refers to the inconsistence between the form and meaning of impoliteness.This paper aims to construct a new model for the analysis of impoliteness in identity construction from the perspective of function,on the basis of Halliday’s’ Register theory,Bucholtz&Hall’s Identity Theory and Martin’s Appraisal Theory.In this model,impoliteness can express emotional identity and project relational identity.Firstly,the communicators in the interaction express their communicative emotions.Impoliteness as an expressive speech act can realize the function of constructing the speaker’s emotional identity.There are two kinds of realization.One is the congruent realization of impoliteness,that is negative emotion expressed by negative denotation.The other is metaphorical realization of impoliteness,that is negative emotion expressed by positive denotation and positive emotion expressed by negative denotation.Secondly,impoliteness is an interactive act between the communicators.The communicators with different relations of power and solidarity projects relational identity through impoliteness.It includes solidifying social relationship and alienating social relationship.Maximizing solidarity and minimizing power help solidify social relationship.Maximizing power and minimizing solidarity contribute to alienating social relationships.The significance of the paper lies in that it redefines the term of impoliteness in a functional way and constructs a model for the analysis of impoliteness in identity construction.It further clarifies impoliteness into congruent impoliteness and metaphorical impoliteness,which opens a new way to the theoretical study in sociolinguistics.