IMPOLITENESS IN DRAMATIC DIALOGUE
IMPOLITENESS IN DRAMATIC DIALOGUE

Summary/Abstract: A number of studies have shown that the frameworks of linguistic politeness can be used to shed light on literary critical issues. Broadly speaking, politeness is very important in the study of drama, it is actually about the strategic manipulation of language, about expediting our conversational goals by saying what is socially appropriate. A framework that brings together face and sociological variables (such as power and social distance) and relates them to motivated linguistic strategies, is going to be useful in helping us understand , on the one hand, how characters position themselves relative to other characters, and, on the other hand, how the plot is pushed forward. Such a framework will allow us to describe systematically, for instance, how one character might ingratiate himself or herself with another or how one character might offend another. In the case of drama, the key dramatic points often occur at times of interactional conflict. Thus, one of the tasks of this work is to start to investigate impoliteness strategies, that is, strategies that are designed to cause offence and social disruption. Firstly, I will try to approach impoliteness by outlining the framework of linguistic politeness, (explaining politeness with reference to the notion of face, positive and negative) and, in the second part, I will briefly consider why the study of impoliteness is important for drama, particularly recent twenty- century drama, analyzing some dialogue extracts from Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party , a play in which conflict has a key role in the development of both plot and character and where the focus is on how (im)politeness relates to characterization.

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