The main purpose of this study is to establish a socio-pragmatic
categorization of politeness and impoliteness activities in informal
interactions. In doing this, we describe the communicative strategies
related to (im)politeness phenomena and how they are used to produce
certain social effects in face-to-face interaction through the ongoing
negotiation of participants' face (Goffman, 1967). This study is based on
informal conversations extracted from a corpus of spoken Spanish gathered
in the metropolitan area of Valencia, Spain (Briz and Val.Es.Co. Group,
2002). Focusing on methodology, this study combines a qualitative method
inspired in CA with a DA interpretative approach that analyzes
communicative acts (Allwood 1995; Bravo, e. p.1). Face contents such as
autonomy and affiliative face, role face, group and individual face, are a
resource for analyzing what happens during interaction along with the
resulting interpersonal effects. The integration of the analysis of
context, which includes the co-text, the situational context and the
socio-cultural context (cultural settings and shared assumptions), is
equally important in this study. The empirical analysis of both the
conversations and a questionnaire on impoliteness bring us to propose a
series of categories of (im)politeness. The categories are as follow:
Strategic Politeness (within this category we find attenuating politeness
and reparatory politeness), Enhancing Politeness, Group Politeness, Ritual
Politeness (here we differentiate between meeting situations and visit
situations) and Discursive Politeness (we divide this category into
conventional and thematic). Concerning Impoliteness, we find situations in
informal conversation in which impoliteness is expected (normative
impoliteness) and when threatening acts (reproaches, criticism, etc.) do
not imply directly, per se, a negative personal effect. We next find two
types of impoliteness: one produced by threats to the face of the speaker
which are neither mitigated nor amended and the other caused by a break
from the normal rules of politeness.
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