The conventionalization of mock impoliteness in Roast!

Liu, Shengnan (2021) The conventionalization of mock impoliteness in Roast! In: 13th meeting of the international Symposium on (Im)Politeness and 7th meeting of the biannual iMean (interaction and meaning), 2021-06-24 - 2021-06-26, Online. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Conventionalization has been discussed in relation to politeness (Terkourafi 2003, 2005, 2015), impoliteness (Culpeper 2010, 2011) and mock politeness (Wang and Taylor 2019). However, little has been said about the conventionalization of mock impoliteness. This research sets out to explore the conventionalization of mock impoliteness in a Chinese online talk show – Roast!, in which mock impoliteness speech events frequently occur. Adopting Terkourafi’s definition of conventionalization, which is based on the frequency of the co-occurrences between language forms and specific contexts, this paper adapted Culpeper’s (2011) and Wang and Taylor’s (2019) methods in identifying conventionalized mock impoliteness formulae in the data emerged from Roast!. This paper focuses on variations of rhetorical questions and imperatives that are associated with the interpretation of mock impoliteness in Mandarin Chinese, which have been identified from the mock impoliteness speech events in the show. A range of queries for rhetorical questions and imperatives are thus generated for further corpus research. A corpus-based approach was then adopted to verify whether rhetorical questions and imperatives are conventionally associated with (im)politeness in a large corpus - Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL, around 581,794,456 characters). The results of the corpus data and the analysis of the data from the show Roast! indicate that within the context of the show Roast!, a number of formulaic usages of rhetorical questions and imperatives (often co-occurring with clause periphery markers and/or certain paralinguistic cues) can be considered as conventionalized mock impoliteness formulae. Interestingly, in contrast with what is normally assumed in most language-change studies, the analysis shows that conventionalization, when is highly contextually driven, may occur in very short time span. This paper also discusses the role of clause periphery markers and paralinguistic cues in encoding intersubjectivity as an overt marker of rapport management (Tantucci & Wang 2018, 2019), as their collocation with rhetorical questions and imperatives was observed in the data. Keywords: Conventionalization, Mock Impoliteness, Chinese