Jonathan Culpeper
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 201316 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Jonathan Culpeper |
| NOMBRES | Jonathan |
| APELLIDO | Culpeper |
| FIRMA | CULPEPER J |
| AFILIACIONES | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9833-6087 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 954 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 50 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1996 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Can ChatGPT reciprocate impoliteness? The AI moral dilemma
Contrasting the Pragmatics of Spanishes
This special issue explores contrastive pragmatics with a focus on Spanish in comparison with other languages and varieties. The collection assembles studies comparing Spanish with Chinese, Greek, English, French, and Italian, as well as investigations of pragmatic variation across different varieties of Spanish. The contributions examine a diverse range of pragmatic phenomena, including humour, impoliteness, aggression, mitigation, requests, com…
Impoliteness reciprocity online
Sociopragmatic variation in Britain
British culture is said to be characterised by off-record or negative politeness and norms giving prominence to social distance. However, this assumes that politeness works in the same way across all British speakers and contexts. Work constituting variational pragmatics – a field at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology – has shown this to be an over-simplification. Using data from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, this paper explo…
Saying goodbye to and thanking bus drivers in German-speaking Switzerland
Inherent linguistic impoliteness
Linguistic impoliteness and religiously aggravated hate crime in England and Wales
Despite its centrality to religiously aggravated hate crime recorded in England and Wales, the nature of the language used has been neglected in research. This paper, based on a unique dataset, aims to rectify this. It takes its approach from the field of linguistic impoliteness, a field that has yet to consider hate crime. Therein lies our second aim: To consider whether impoliteness notions can be usefully extended to the language of hate crime…
Reciprocity and epistemicity
Reciprocity is a (proto)social mechanism that involves (im)politeness as a balance of positive and negative actions among individuals: doing something good to someone is expected to be reciprocated in kind (cf. Culpeper & Tantucci 2021). The same applies for negatively charged behaviour (Culpeper & Tantucci 2021). The present study advances the theory of reciprocity both empirically and theoretically, as it extends the model to contexts of inform…
The metalinguistics of offence in (British) English
Offence is a central concept in impoliteness, aggression and conflict research, yet has received only passing mention in definitions of impoliteness and related concepts. Janicki (2017) argues that impoliteness and language aggression scholars are needlessly worried about definitions. We use Janicki’s (2017) work as a springboard into a discussion of definitions of impolite or taboo language, airing potential problems and suggesting that the stud…
Compliment responses in Hong Kong
This paper focusses on compliment responses in the context of group undergraduate student projects, in a university in Hong Kong. It applies Geoffrey Leech’s model of politeness. Although less well known than some other politeness models, it has proved relatively popular in studies of compliment responses, which are often said to involve a clash between the Maxim of Agreement (achieved by agreeing with the complimenter) and the Maxim of Modesty (…
Politeness reciprocity in Shakespeare’s dialogue
Recently, it has been proposed that (im)politeness in interaction today is governed in large part by a Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity ( Culpeper and Tantucci 2021 ). This paper investigates whether politeness reciprocity works similarly in early modern English – specifically, in the plays of Shakespeare. Focussing on thanking behaviours, the questions of whether politeness reciprocity can be detected, and, if so, how social status might …
The Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity
Despite featuring prominently in religions and legal frameworks, and being discussed by anthropologists and sociologists in relation to rights and obligations in society, reciprocity has not received the attention it deserves in the (im)politeness literature. This article proposes and defines the Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity, which concerns the (mis)matching of (im)politeness across participants in interaction - something which can be …
Impoliteness and hate speech
Shakespeare’s language
No description provided
What do students find difficult when they read Shakespeare? Problems and solutions
Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the subject of much discussion in the last few decades. This article begins by reviewing that discussion, showing how different approaches – textual, contextual and active (or performance) – connect with the language of the plays. No study, it is pointed out, has conducted an empirical investigation as to what exactly students find problematic when they …
National identities in the context of Shakespeare’s Henry V
Shakespeare’s clearest use of dialect for sociolinguistic reasons can be found in the play Henry V, where we meet the Welshman Captain Fluellen, the Scotsman Captain Jamy and the Irishman Captain Macmorris. But what might contemporary audiences have made of these Celtic characters? What popular understandings of Celtic identities did Shakespeare’s characters trigger? Recent technological developments, largely in the domain of corpus linguistics, …
Shameless normalisation of impoliteness
This paper applies the notions of impoliteness and shameless normalisation to potentially impolite behaviours produced by Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi in official press conferences. Press conferences, as an activity type, involve relatively clear expectations and norms, so that impolite behaviours theoretically constitute particularly salient violations. We present two case studies involving racist and misogynist insults on the part of Berl…
Affirmatives in Early Modern English
This study examines the affirmatives yes, yea and ay in Early Modern English, more specifically in the period 1560 to 1760. Affirmatives have an obvious role as responses to yes/no questions in dialogues, and so this study demanded the kind of dialogical material provided by the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 . I examine the meanings and contexts of usage of each affirmative: their distribution across time and text-types, their collocates …
Pragmatics
Timmis, Ivor
John Webster, the dark and violent playwright
Dynamic resonance and social reciprocity in language change
The influence of Italian manners on politeness in England, 1550–1620
This paper focuses on the influence of Italian conduct manuals, as translated into English, in the second half of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. I approach this task in two ways. One is to trace the rise of the term manners , and also to examine the words with which it typically cohabited, thus giving a sense of the discourses of which it was a part. The analysis reveals a dramatic rise in usage of the term in the period 155…
Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen
Pragmatics and the English Language
Meaning can kill you. In the UK in 1952, Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig broke into a warehouse. Craig was armed with a revolver. They had been seen entering, and the police were called. One police officer managed to grab hold of Bentley. At this point, witnesses claimed that Bentley said: Let him have it, Chris. Craig fired, but only grazed the police officer. Nevertheless Bentley was arrested, while Craig managed to get away. Upon the arriv…
Towards an anatomy of impoliteness
Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show
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"…
Impoliteness revisited
Conventionalised impoliteness formulae
The Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity
Despite featuring prominently in religions and legal frameworks, and being discussed by anthropologists and sociologists in relation to rights and obligations in society, reciprocity has not received the attention it deserves in the (im)politeness literature. This article proposes and defines the Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity, which concerns the (mis)matching of (im)politeness across participants in interaction - something which can be …
Shameless normalisation of impoliteness
This paper applies the notions of impoliteness and shameless normalisation to potentially impolite behaviours produced by Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi in official press conferences. Press conferences, as an activity type, involve relatively clear expectations and norms, so that impolite behaviours theoretically constitute particularly salient violations. We present two case studies involving racist and misogynist insults on the part of Berl…
Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness
This paper investigates cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness. It is based on 500 impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany, and Turkey. The main analytical framework adopted is Spencer-Oatey's (e.g. Rapport management: A framework for analysis, Continuum, 2000) “rapport management,” covering various types of face as well as sociality rights. We offer some clarifications of this framework, a…
(Im)politeness
Reciprocity and epistemicity
Reciprocity is a (proto)social mechanism that involves (im)politeness as a balance of positive and negative actions among individuals: doing something good to someone is expected to be reciprocated in kind (cf. Culpeper & Tantucci 2021). The same applies for negatively charged behaviour (Culpeper & Tantucci 2021). The present study advances the theory of reciprocity both empirically and theoretically, as it extends the model to contexts of inform…
Impoliteness and hate speech
Keyness
This paper explores keywords, key part-of-speech categories and key semantic categories and their role in text analysis. The first part of the paper addresses a set of issues relating to the definition of keywords and their history, the settings used in deriving keywords, the choice of reference corpora, the different kinds of keyword that emerge in one’s results and the dispersion of keywords in one’s data. It argues, amongst other things, that …
Pragmatics
Impoliteness
Constructing witches and spells
In this paper, we highlight the centrality of verbs relating to verbal activities in witchcraft narratives in the Early Modern English period, and focus on speech act verbs used to refer to witches’ curses. In the first part, we refer to various classifications of speech act verbs and to Searle’s felicity conditions for speech acts, in order to describe the different meanings of verbs such as to curse, and to show how their central meaning has sh…
Nineteenth-century English politeness
In this paper we argue that the kind of individualistic ethos Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model is accused of — and in particular its notion of (non-imposition) negative face — is not simply a reflection of British culture, but a reflection of British culture at a specific point in time. That point is the nineteenth century. Before then, the notion of an individual self separate from society and with its own hidden desires was not full…
Activity types’ and ‘discourse types’
This paper aims to enhance our understanding of interactions between French/English Foreign Language Assistants (FLAs) and their school mentors (MEs), and, more specifically, of how ‘advice’ is sought, given and received. More generally, it will articulate a pragmatic approach (employing the notion of ‘activity type’) that can help achieve this aim. The paper draws on a sub-set of the data produced for the Pragmatics and Intercultural Communicati…
Dynamic resonance and social reciprocity in language change
Inherent linguistic impoliteness
Data in historical pragmatics
In this paper we examine four speech-related text types in terms of how linguistically close they are to spoken face-to-face interaction. Our “conversational” diagnostics include lexical repetitions, question marks (as an indicator of question-answer adjacency pairs), interruptions, and several single word interactive features (first- and second-person pronouns, private verbs and demonstrative pronouns). We discuss the nature of these diagnostics…
Sociopragmatic variation in Britain
British culture is said to be characterised by off-record or negative politeness and norms giving prominence to social distance. However, this assumes that politeness works in the same way across all British speakers and contexts. Work constituting variational pragmatics – a field at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology – has shown this to be an over-simplification. Using data from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, this paper explo…
From `Politically Correct Councillors' to `Blairite Nonsense
This article explores discourses of `political correctness' (`PC') in a corpus of articles gathered from three broadsheet newspapers in the UK between 1994 and 1999. Using the software package WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1999) two types of analysis were undertaken: first, a numerical count of so-called `PC'-related terms (`political correctness', `politically correct', etc.) in each of the three newspapers; and second, a compilation of the `keywords'…
Impoliteness reciprocity online
The influence of Italian manners on politeness in England, 1550–1620
This paper focuses on the influence of Italian conduct manuals, as translated into English, in the second half of the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. I approach this task in two ways. One is to trace the rise of the term manners , and also to examine the words with which it typically cohabited, thus giving a sense of the discourses of which it was a part. The analysis reveals a dramatic rise in usage of the term in the period 155…
Using a corpus to test a model of speech and thought presentation
Inferring character from texts
The Borrowing of Classical and Romance Words into English
This paper describes a study designed to investigate the effect of Classical and Romance vocabulary on the English lexicon. The study involved a series of computer searches, using the CD-ROM version of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989). Our aim was to discover how many and at what point in time words were borrowed into English from Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The paper describes the general obstacles and limitations…
Inferring character from texts
Towards an anatomy of impoliteness
Using a corpus to test a model of speech and thought presentation
Data in historical pragmatics
In this paper we examine four speech-related text types in terms of how linguistically close they are to spoken face-to-face interaction. Our “conversational” diagnostics include lexical repetitions, question marks (as an indicator of question-answer adjacency pairs), interruptions, and several single word interactive features (first- and second-person pronouns, private verbs and demonstrative pronouns). We discuss the nature of these diagnostics…
Constructing witches and spells
In this paper, we highlight the centrality of verbs relating to verbal activities in witchcraft narratives in the Early Modern English period, and focus on speech act verbs used to refer to witches’ curses. In the first part, we refer to various classifications of speech act verbs and to Searle’s felicity conditions for speech acts, in order to describe the different meanings of verbs such as to curse, and to show how their central meaning has sh…
Cognitive stylistics
From `Politically Correct Councillors' to `Blairite Nonsense
This article explores discourses of `political correctness' (`PC') in a corpus of articles gathered from three broadsheet newspapers in the UK between 1994 and 1999. Using the software package WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1999) two types of analysis were undertaken: first, a numerical count of so-called `PC'-related terms (`political correctness', `politically correct', etc.) in each of the three newspapers; and second, a compilation of the `keywords'…
Impoliteness revisited
Impoliteness and Entertainment in the Television Quiz Show
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"…
An Introduction to Early Modern English ‐ By Terttu Nevalainen
Rude Britannia edited by Mina Gorji
Chapter 2. Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power
Impoliteness
Activity types’ and ‘discourse types’
This paper aims to enhance our understanding of interactions between French/English Foreign Language Assistants (FLAs) and their school mentors (MEs), and, more specifically, of how ‘advice’ is sought, given and received. More generally, it will articulate a pragmatic approach (employing the notion of ‘activity type’) that can help achieve this aim. The paper draws on a sub-set of the data produced for the Pragmatics and Intercultural Communicati…
Historical sociopragmatics
Preview this article: Historical sociopragmatics: An introduction, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/jhp.10.2.02cul-1.gif
Keyness
This paper explores keywords, key part-of-speech categories and key semantic categories and their role in text analysis. The first part of the paper addresses a set of issues relating to the definition of keywords and their history, the settings used in deriving keywords, the choice of reference corpora, the different kinds of keyword that emerge in one’s results and the dispersion of keywords in one’s data. It argues, amongst other things, that …
Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness
This paper investigates cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness. It is based on 500 impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany, and Turkey. The main analytical framework adopted is Spencer-Oatey's (e.g. Rapport management: A framework for analysis, Continuum, 2000) “rapport management,” covering various types of face as well as sociality rights. We offer some clarifications of this framework, a…
Conventionalised impoliteness formulae
Impoliteness
When is language considered 'impolite'? Is impolite language only used for anti-social purposes? Can impolite language be creative? What is the difference between 'impoliteness' and 'rudeness'? Grounded in naturally-occurring language data and drawing on findings from linguistic pragmatics and social psychology, Jonathan Culpeper provides a fascinating account of how impolite behaviour works. He examines not only its forms and functions but also …
Historical sociopragmatics
Historical sociopragmatics
Nineteenth-century English politeness
In this paper we argue that the kind of individualistic ethos Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model is accused of — and in particular its notion of (non-imposition) negative face — is not simply a reflection of British culture, but a reflection of British culture at a specific point in time. That point is the nineteenth century. Before then, the notion of an individual self separate from society and with its own hidden desires was not full…
(Im)politeness
(Im)politeness and exploitative TV in Britain and North America
Biressi and Nunn (2005, p. 2) note that ‘the highly visible presence of ordinary people in “unscripted” situations is both the watermark of reality TV (RTV) and arguably an explanation of its success with audiences’. RTV creates entertainment through its likeness to what audiences recognize as real . That sense of the ‘real’ can be enhanced by the use of language that is unscripted (not predictable), unstandardized (not conforming to prestige dia…
Linguistics (39 obras) · Philosophy (38 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (33 obras) · Psychology (31 obras) · Philosophy (25 obras) · Sociology (25 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (17 obras) · Politeness (16 obras) · History (15 obras)