Conventionalized impoliteness in English and Polish : The case of 'you idiot!'

Van Olmen, Daniel and Andersson, Marta (2025) Conventionalized impoliteness in English and Polish : The case of 'you idiot!'. In: The Grammar of Impoliteness :. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs . De Gruyter Brill, Berlin, pp. 283-306. ISBN 9783111475271

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Abstract

This study argues against the dominant view in the current research that linguistic forms cannot be conventionalized for (im)politeness. As a case study, we examine a construction in English and Polish typically characterized as express-ing addressee evaluation, i.e. ‘you idiot/beauty!’. However, recent work has shown that this construction is heavily biased toward genuine insults in usage and has therefore claimed that it exhibits a high level of conventionalization for impolite-ness, possibly due to the pragmatic explicitness and directness of adding the second person pronoun to an address. We put this claim to the test, through a questionnaire that asks first language speakers to rate the well-formedness and (im)politeness of addresses featuring different types of nouns with ‘you’ or without it. Our results confirm the construction’s overall conventionalization for impoliteness. Addresses with evaluatively neutral nouns such as ‘reader’, for example, are found not only to be less well-formed when combining with the second person pronoun but also to be forced into an evaluative and, more specifically, impolite interpretation with ‘you’. Yet, our results contain little evidence for the hypothesis in the previous work that the second person pronoun would increase the impoliteness of negatively eval-uative addresses like ‘(you) idiot!’ or for the idea in the earlier wo