Speaker: Dániel Zoltán Kádár
Research Professor of Pragmatics & Head of the MTA Lendulet Interactional Ritual Research Group, Dept. of Theoretical Linguistics, Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Professor of English Language and Linguistics & Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Pragmatics and Interaction, Department of English Linguistics and Foreign Languages, School of Humanities, Music and Media, University of Huddersfield.
Time: 15:00-17:00, Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Venue: Room 116, Wen-nan Building, Tsinghua University
Hosts: Feng Zongxin and Wu Xia
Abstract
As part of the post-2000 boom of politeness research, impoliteness has become a key area of exploration. Essentially, impoliteness describes the ways in which we cause offence to others (see an overview in Culpeper, 2011). However, impoliteness research has somewhat failed to take the phenomenon of aggression on board, and it has only been recently that aggression started to receive some attention, owing to the publication of the cutting-edge Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict. However, so far no major theory of language aggression has been published in the (im)politeness field, even though Kadar (2017) has addressed this phenomenon to a certain degree. This lack is surprising, if one considers that there are many instances in our daily lives when we need to behave in an aggressive fashion but we would certainly not consider ourselves being impolite. For example, aggressively scolding a family member who has committed something illegal for this person’s sake is certainly not impolite, due to the familial setting and the moral motivation behind the scolding. Rudely stopping a scooter driver who wants to drive away in a hit-and-run incident is also not impolite in a strict sense, since such an action might be considered as the only legitimate way in the given context. In this lecture, I am looking into aggression phenomenon according to these lines, and will suggest a framework through which one can disentangle the relationship between aggression and impoliteness.
