A Relevance-Theoretic Perspective on (Im)politeness Issues in the CB Radio Discourse of Polish Drivers

Abstract

This paper has two major objectives. The first objective is to present the phenomenon of CB radio discourse of Polish drivers and discuss its main features. The second goal is to analyse two of these features from the angle of the (im)politeness issues, using the perspective of Relevance Theory. The first part of the paper is devoted to a general discussion of the phenomenon under scrutiny: the socio-cultural background of the CB radio discourse as well as its basic linguistic features are presented. In the second part of the paper, I discuss Escandell-Vidal’s approach to politeness within Relevance framework (Escandell-Vidal 2004) and integrate the model with the habitus-based definition of politeness (Bourdieu 1977; Watts 2003). The final part of the paper shows how the integrated approach can be used to examine two major aspects of the CB radio discourse: its conversational structure and the use of diminutives.