A Pragmatic Study Of Verbal Off-record Impoliteness

Conflictive and offensive utterances are pervasive in interpersonal interactions.Over the last twenty years verbal impoliteness has drawn great academic attention at home and abroad.Yet,relevant literature review indicates that off-record impoliteness in Chinese context is relatively under-researched.Drawing upon Culpeper's impoliteness model and Spencer-Oatey's rapport management framework,the thesis attempts to make a pragmatic analysis of verbal off-record impoliteness with a case study of A Dream of Red Mansions,which involves linguistic devices,pragmatic features,pragmatic motivations and response options.Data analysis reveals that in verbal communication rhetorical questions,puns,sarcasm,and metaphors and metonomies tend to be used as linguistic devices for conveying off-record impoliteness.Three dominant pragmatic features are found in off-record impoliteness utterances,namely,deliberateness,aggressiveness and insinuativeness.The speaker performs face attack and/or sociality rights infringement to the targeted addressee by means of indirect speech.In most cases off-record impoliteness is no less offensive than on-record impoliteness.Off-record impoliteness may occur in dyadic interactions and polylogal interacions.In addition,verbal off-record impoliteness is applied for the speaker's construction of pragmatic identity,saving self's face and venting negative emotions,which may do damage to harmonious interpersonal relationships.Data analysis also indicates that staying silent and defensive response are two of the strategies used most frequently as the response options for verbal off-record impoliteness.The present study is conducive to our better understanding of the workings of impoliteness in Chinese context.Besides,it provides practical implications for our daily verbal communication.