A corpus-based analysis of (im)politeness metalanguage and speech acts: The case of insults in Shakespeare's plays

IF 1.8 1区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Journal of Pragmatics Pub Date : 2025-01-01 DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2024.11.011

Samuel J. Oliver

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

In response to calls for first-order approaches to (im)politeness from scholars such as Watts et al. (2005 [1992]) and Eelen (2001), Oliver (2022) developed a corpus-based method for inductively locating (im)politeness metalinguistic items, wherein a total of 234 (im)politeness metalinguistic forms such as civil, kind, and villainous were located across 4023 instances in a corpus of Shakespeare's plays. Some scholars (e.g. Haugh, 2007:302; Haugh and Culpeper, 2018:216–217) have observed that the discursive perspective to (im)politeness precludes generalisation across encounters, and therefore quantitative corpus-based analysis. This study deviates from the discursive perspective by testing a corpus-based analysis of the relationship between (im)politeness metalanguage and speech acts, via insults, in the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus. While the results reveal methodological challenges with a corpus-based approach to identifying and comparing both phenomena, the approach nonetheless locates 11 conventionalised formulae for insulting encompassing 1447 instances. A sample of these insults are explored to examine their relationship with (im)politeness metalanguage, enriching an understanding of the use of (im)politeness metalanguage and insults in Shakespeare's plays generally. For example, it reveals that instances where (im)politeness metalanguage follows an impolite event tend to be when that event has a high impact on the events of the play.

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来源期刊

Journal of Pragmatics Multiple-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

18.80%

发文量

219

期刊介绍： Since 1977, the Journal of Pragmatics has provided a forum for bringing together a wide range of research in pragmatics, including cognitive pragmatics, corpus pragmatics, experimental pragmatics, historical pragmatics, interpersonal pragmatics, multimodal pragmatics, sociopragmatics, theoretical pragmatics and related fields. Our aim is to publish innovative pragmatic scholarship from all perspectives, which contributes to theories of how speakers produce and interpret language in different contexts drawing on attested data from a wide range of languages/cultures in different parts of the world. The Journal of Pragmatics also encourages work that uses attested language data to explore the relationship between pragmatics and neighbouring research areas such as semantics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, interactional linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, media studies, psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of language. Alongside full-length articles, discussion notes and book reviews, the journal welcomes proposals for high quality special issues in all areas of pragmatics which make a significant contribution to a topical or developing area at the cutting-edge of research.