Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show: ‘The Weakest Link’.

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.
Official URL: 10.1515/jplr.2005.1.1.35

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:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Journal of Politeness Research
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/researchoutput/libraryofcongress/p1
Subjects:
?? IMPOLITENESSMIMICRYPOLITENESSPROSODYQUIZ SHOWSSARCASMLINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGELANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICSCOMMUNICATIONSOCIAL PSYCHOLOGYCULTURAL STUDIESP PHILOLOGY. LINGUISTICS ??
ID Code:
1061
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
29 Jan 2008 16:29
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
19 Mar 2024 00:36