Culpeper, Jonathan (2005) Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show: ‘The Weakest Link’. Journal of Politeness Research, 1 (1). pp. 35-72. ISSN 1612-5681
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Building on Culpeper (1996) and Culpeper et al. (2003), I first propose a new definition of impoliteness and general revisions to my model of impoliteness, both derived from data analyses. Given that my particular data in this paper, The Weakest Link, is a television entertainment quiz show, I will briefly account for why impoliteness might be entertaining. As a backdrop to my micro-analyses of interactions, I discuss the nature of “exploitative” chat and game shows, and I examine the structure of The Weakest Link and how it maximizes the potential for face-damage. In my analyses, I show the formulaic and creative nature of parts of the discourse, and also how analyzing prosody is key to understanding the impoliteness. I pay special attention to “off-record impoliteness”, sarcasm and mimicry, and I integrate into my model Spencer-Oatey’s (2002) revisions of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) concepts of negative and positive face. Finally, referring to Levinson’s (1992) “activity types”, I consider whether the context of the quiz show “neutralizes” the “impoliteness”. I argue that the salience of “impolite” signals engulf the context, with the result that targets often take offense in contexts where they theoretically should not.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of Politeness Research |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | impoliteness ; mimicry ; politeness ; prosody ; quiz shows ; sarcasm |
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
| Departments: | Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences > Linguistics & English Language |
| ID Code: | 1061 |
| Deposited By: | Dr Jonathan Culpeper |
| Deposited On: | 29 Jan 2008 16:29 |
| Refereed?: | Yes |
| Published?: | Published |
| Last Modified: | 26 Jul 2012 14:50 |
| Identification Number: | |
| URI: | http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/1061 |
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