Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 87, October 2015, Pages 127-141
Journal of Pragmatics

Beyond sarcasm: The metalanguage and structures of mock politeness

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.08.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Previous research into mock politeness is synthesised and used to argue that mock politeness should not be equated with sarcasm.

  • A first-order metalanguage approach is used to investigate how people talk about and perform mock politeness.

  • The first-order metalanguage used for referring to mock politeness is presented.

  • The range of structures for realising mock politeness in everyday interactions are described.

Abstract

This paper aims to cast light on the somewhat neglected area of mock politeness. The principle objectives are to describe the ways that mock politeness is talked about and performed. In order to investigate such usage, I analyse data from informal, naturally occurring conversations in a UK-based online forum. The paper introduces a range of metalinguistic expressions which are used to refer to mock polite behaviours in lay interactions and describes the different structures of mock polite behaviours. The analysis shows that both metalanguage and structure are more diverse than anticipated by previous research and, as a result, the paper argues against equating mock politeness with sarcasm and calls for further research into mock politeness as an important strategy of impoliteness.

Introduction

In this paper I aim to draw attention to the phenomenon of mock politeness and describe the ways in which it is evaluated and performed. The phenomenon described here under the label mock politeness (following Culpeper, 1996, who, in turn, adopted it from Leech, 1983), has frequently been discussed within im/politeness studies using other terms, such as irony and sarcasm, (e.g. Leech, 1983, followed by Culpeper, 1996), off-record impoliteness (e.g. Bousfield, 2008, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010a, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010b), implicational impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011) and mock politeness implicatures (Haugh, 2014a). Furthermore, outside the field of im/politeness, it has been addressed under the terms sarcasm and, less frequently, irony. As I will argue throughout this paper, the equation of mock politeness with irony/sarcasm is problematic because the label of sarcasm is simultaneously too broad, because behaviours labelled as sarcastic do not always perform mock politeness, and too narrow because there are mock polite behaviours which would not be labelled as sarcastic in either the lay or academic/theoretical senses.

In this introductory section, I start by clarifying the distinction between first and second order concepts of im/politeness, briefly trace the history of mock politeness within impoliteness studies and present the definition of mock politeness which will be employed in this paper.

One of the primary distinctions made in current studies of im/politeness is between the notions of first-order im/politeness and second order im/politeness (also notated as im/politeness1 and im/politeness2 following Eelen, 2001). This distinction largely follows Watts et al. (1992:3) who defined first-order politeness as ‘the various ways in which polite behaviour is perceived and talked about by members of socio-cultural groups’ and second-order politeness as a ‘theoretical construct, a term within a theory of social behaviour and language usage’. This development has been described as one of the most significant developments in im/politeness research (e.g. Mitchell and Haugh, 2015) and a central tenet of the discursive approach (e.g. Terkourafi, 2005, van der Bom and Mills, 2015). According to Eelen (2001:77) the distinction is necessary in order to prevent the epistemological status of the theoretical analysis becoming blurred. If the analyst does not maintain this distinction, the risk is that a (culturally specific) lay-concept is elevated to the status of a second-order concept by the backdoor (Watts et al.1992:4).1 In operational terms, addressing first-order understandings requires the analyst to look at extended sequences of interaction and start from participant evaluations (discussed further in section 2.1). As Davies et al. (2011:272, italics in original) note, in ‘the move away from the concept of the omniscient analyst […] we are now concerned with the issue of identifying im/politeness behaviour’. This is particularly relevant to studies that address the second-order concepts of irony and sarcasm, because, as Partington (2007:1550) protested:

[i]n very many studies in the field, the examples discussed, whether invented or selected, are taken for granted as being ironic for no other reason than that the author intuitively feels them to be so. Any discussion of irony based upon data which has not been previously validated as ironic runs the risk of being both oversubjective and circular.

 Partington (2007:1550)

This problematising of the processes of identification is part of a more general movement in im/politeness research, indeed according to Haugh (2013:61) ‘[o]ne of the most significant developments in im/politeness research has been the shift away from a singular focus on the speaker's behaviour or intentions’.

The first significant theorisation of mock im/politeness within a frame of im/politeness occurs in Leech's (1983) work on The Principles of Pragmatics. He identifies two important aspects of im/politeness mismatch: the irony principle and the banter principle, which he proposes may be expressed as follows:

Irony Principle: if you must cause offence, at least do so in a way which doesn’t overtly conflict with the PP [Politeness Principle], but allows the hearer to arrive at the offensive point of your remark indirectly, by way of implicature

Banter Principle: in order to show solidarity with h, say something which is (i) obviously untrue, and (ii) obviously impolite to (h)

 Leech (1983:82/144)

In this description the choice of ‘irony’ for the expression of an impolite belief seems to serve to reduce the impolite force of the utterance and ‘[permits] aggression to manifest itself in a less dangerous verbal form than by direct criticism, insults, threats, etc.’ (1983:143–144), which appears close to Brown and Levinson's positioning of irony as a potential off-record strategy for mitigating face-threat (1987:221):

By saying the opposite of what he means, again a violation of Quality, S can indirectly convey his intended meaning, if there are clues that his intended meaning is being conveyed indirectly. Such clues may be prosodic (e.g. nasality), kinesic (e.g. a smirk), or simply contextual.

 Brown and Levinson (1987:221–222)

However, in his summary of the relationship between irony and banter, Leech makes it clear that the relative goals are impoliteness and politeness, stating that: ‘[w]hile irony is an apparently friendly way of being offensive (mock-politeness), the type of verbal behaviour known as “banter” is an offensive way of being friendly (mock impoliteness)’ (Leech, 1983:144). Thus, we can see that the second order concept of mock politeness from its inception was intended as a strategy of impoliteness.

In more recent work, Leech (2014) refers to ‘sarcasm or conversational irony’ and in his revised definition, shown below, retains the emphasis on the covert expression of impoliteness and the importance of context for disambiguation (marked in italics).

In order to be ironic, S expresses or implies a meaning (let's call it Meaning I) that associates a favorable value with what pertains to O (O = other person(s), mainly the addressee) or associates an unfavorable value with what pertains to S (S = self, speaker). At the same time, by means of Meaning I and the context, S more indirectly implies a second, deeper meaning (Meaning II) that cancels out Meaning I by associating an unfavorable value with what pertains to O, or associating a favorable meaning with what pertains to S. The derivation of Meaning II from Meaning I is by means of two paths of inference: first, Meaning I is infelicitous (i.e., pragmatically untenable in context, often because of violation of the Cooperative Principle) and therefore to be rejected; and second, given that the meaning is infelicitous and in accordance with the PP, the obvious way to make sense of it is to look for a related interpretation that is felicitous and not in accordance with the PP—which is what the Irony Principle provides.

 Leech (2014:233)

Regarding naming choices of what he also refers to as ‘mock politeness’, he defends the choice of ‘irony’ by drawing on research from irony studies and noting that ‘Wilson has linked this theory to “expressing a mocking, scornful or contemptuous attitude” (Wilson, 2013), so that the connection between irony and (im)politeness is implicitly made’ (Leech, 2014:232). In previous research into the same dataset examined here (Taylor, 2015) I found that the verbal behaviours which were described as ironic and sarcastic by lay participants did indeed always involve the expression of some negative evaluation but this did not apply to a comparable set of Italian language data, suggesting a possible cultural bias.

Following Leech (1983), the irony principle was integrated into one of the first attempts to model impoliteness in Culpeper (1996). Within this early framework, the strategies of impoliteness are:

  • (1)

    Bald on record impoliteness – the FTA is performed in a direct, clear, unambiguous and concise way in circumstances where face is not irrelevant or minimised.

  • (2)

    Positive impoliteness – the use of strategies designed to damage the addressee's positive face wants.

  • (3)

    Negative impoliteness – the use of strategies designed to damage the addressee's negative face wants.

  • (4)

    Sarcasm or mock politeness – the FTA is performed with the use of politeness strategies that are obviously insincere, and thus remain surface realisations.

  • (5)

    Withhold politeness – the absence of politeness work where it would be expected.

     Culpeper (1996:356–357)

In the fourth strategy, we see the recurrence of mock politeness, although here it has been renamed as ‘sarcasm or mock politeness’ because Culpeper notes that ‘I prefer the use of the term sarcasm to Leech's irony, since irony can be used for enjoyment and comedy. Sarcasm (mock politeness for social disharmony) is clearly the opposite of banter (mock impoliteness for social harmony)’ (1996:356). The same label is applied in the revision of this framework in Culpeper et al. (2003) and the model has subsequently been adopted in a number of investigations of impoliteness (as a rough measure of uptake, Google scholar currently lists some 629 citations of the 1996 article and 337 citations of the 2003 paper).

Later models by the same authors replace sarcasm with the broader categories of off-record politeness (Culpeper, 2005, Bousfield, 2008) and implicational impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011) and therefore the more specific area of mock politeness has received less attention in the field. However, it is still fully accounted for in Culpeper's model of implicational impoliteness, which includes the following categorisation:

  • (1)

    Form-driven: the surface form or semantic content of a behaviour is marked.

  • (2)

    Convention-driven:

    • (a)

      Internal: the context projected by part of a behaviour mismatches that projected by another part; or

    • (b)

      External: the context projected by a behaviour mismatches the context of use.

  • (3)

    Context-driven:

    • (a)

      Unmarked behaviour: an unmarked (with respect to surface form or semantic content) and unconventionalised behaviour mismatches the context; or

    • (b)

      Absence of behaviour: the absence of a behaviour mismatches the context.

     Adapted from Culpeper 2011:155–156 (italics in original)

The second category of convention-driven impoliteness implicatures would encompass mock politeness (although the two are not interchangeable because there could be convention-driven implicatures which do not involve a mismatch of politeness/impoliteness). What is important about this model, and a significant way in which it differs from previous descriptions of mock politeness, is that it accounts for both internal and external mismatch (discussed as co-textual and contextual mismatch in Taylor, 2011). To illustrate this, I will anticipate two examples from the corpus used in this study (bold is used to highlight the metapragmatic comment and the verbal behaviour which is being described is underlined):

In the first example, in which the utterance no problem is described as sarcastic, the mismatch lies between the behaviour, which is a conventional second-part in a thanking-acknowledgement adjacency pair, and the context, in which there was no first part expression of thanks (where it might have been expected). In the second example, the im/politeness mismatch in the put down lies in the context projected by the first part of the behaviour (I’d like to see things from your point of view, suggesting the speaker values the hearer) and the second part of the behaviour (but I can’t stick my head that far up my ass, suggesting the speaker is insulting the hearer). Like the example of ‘Could you just fuck off?’, discussed in Culpeper (2011) and Leech (2014), the utterance mixes conventionalised politeness formula with conventionalised impoliteness formula, and as Culpeper explains ‘[a]n interpretation triggered through mismatching is more implicit and involves more inferencing than one triggered through matching, as targets must spend cognitive effort in resolving internal or external mismatches’ (2011:166–167). In both examples (1) and (2) there a mismatch of im/politeness and the hearer is required to test various interpretive hypotheses, with reference to the context, before (possibly) arriving at the speakers intended meaning of impoliteness. Thus, both types require some kind of ‘re-processing’ of the apparently polite move in order to give rise to the an impoliteness implicature. It is the second type, that involving internal mismatch in the co-text, which has previously been neglected. Although it is mentioned in Leech's (2014) study of mock politeness under the heading of attitude clash, which is defined as ‘a case where the overt “polite” meaning and the “impolite” meaning of irony occur side by side in the same piece of language’ (2014:238), he does not resolve the (acknowledged) discrepancy between a definition of mock politeness that relies on covert and deniable expression of impoliteness and the on-record nature of this kind of mock politeness. Indeed, this second type of mock politeness constitutes the principle challenge to subsuming mock politeness under a category of off-record impoliteness.

Rather than conceiving these two examples as entirely different types of mismatch, we may consider them as representing opposing points on a continuum of mock politeness, from a contextual external mismatch to a co-textual internal mismatch. Towards the centre of such a continuum, we could envisage the communication of mismatch through meta-communicative cues, as reported for both mock impoliteness (e.g. Haugh, 2010:2108) and irony (e.g. Attardo, 2000b). Indeed, Culpeper (2011) further specifies two categories of internal mismatch: multimodal mismatches in which verbal oral and visual elements may convey conflicting messages and verbal formula mismatches and we may hypothesise that the multimodal mismatches are likely to be positioned in a more central position on the continuum.

A recent exception to the general side-lining of mock politeness is Haugh's (2014a) extensive work on im/politeness implicatures, in which he discusses mock politeness implicatures, defined as ‘an ostensibly “polite” stance, which is indicated through the occurrence of a (non-) linguistic form or practice that would in other circumstances be associated with a polite attitude, masks or disguises an “impolite” stance that arises through implicature’ Haugh (2014a:278). The definition of mock politeness which is employed in this study is similar to Haugh's model and is as follows:

mock politeness occurs when there is an im/politeness mismatch leading to an implicature of impoliteness

This definition therefore positions mock politeness within the category of implicational impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011) and crucial components are the presence of mismatch and evaluation of impoliteness.2 The definition used in this study is deliberately broader in scope than that of Haugh (2014a), for instance in the specification of im/politeness mismatch rather than masking or disguise precisely because I want to address all those instances along that continuum of im/politeness mismatch, from instances where the mismatch arises from contextual factors, as illustrated in (1), to those where it is explicitly present in the co-text, as illustrated in (2). Another key feature in this definition is that it does not refer to intention. As Culpeper (2011:22) comments ‘[i]mpoliteness is very much in the eye of the beholder, that is, the mind's eye. It depends on how you perceive what is said and done and how that relates to the situation’. First-order evaluations of im/politeness are made without access to actual intention (although they are undoubtedly influenced by perceptions of intention and accountability) and nor can a researcher access speaker intention.3 Thus, employing this definition means that, in the following analysis, I treat an utterance as impolite if it has been evaluated by any participant (speaker, addressee or observer) as impolite. As the definition also makes clear, mock politeness is here being constructed as a second-order concept, in line with Leech, 1983, Leech, 2014 theorisation, and, following Watts et al. (1992:4) stricture that second order concepts should not use first-order labels (mock politeness or derivations thereof were not found in the corpus analysed here).4

In contrast with the relative neglect of mock politeness, mock impoliteness, drawing on the second of Leech's principles mentioned above, has received more extensive attention and theorisation in recent years (cf. Bousfield, 2007, Haugh, 2010, Haugh, 2014a, Haugh, 2014b, Haugh and Bousfield, 2012), perhaps reflecting the way in which politeness has generally attracted more attention than impoliteness (as described Locher and Bousfield, 2008, for example). In many ways, mock impoliteness has been seen as a counterpart to mock politeness, described as its ‘unmistakeable flipside’ (Bousfield, 2008:136), and it is for this reason that research in this area may be relevant for the study of mock politeness.5 Of particular relevance is Haugh and Bousfield's (2012:1103) position of treating ‘mock impoliteness and banter as linked, but discrete concepts. The former constitutes an evaluation while the latter constitutes an action’. A mirrored process needs to be performed in the detachment of sarcasm or irony and mock politeness. Research has shown that sarcasm may be used as either mock politeness or as mock impoliteness (discussed as mock mock politeness in Bousfield, 2008) as, for instance, in Brown's (2013) analysis of sarcastic honorifics in Korean. With irony, the argument is even stronger because the existence of ironic compliments (also labelled as asteism, Attardo, 2000a; ironic praise, Colston and Gibbs, 2007; ironic compliments, Pexman and Olineck, 2002; positively evaluative irony, Dynel, 2013; positive irony, Alba-Juez and Attardo, 2014) is well-documented in the literature.6 Thus, we can say that mock impoliteness may be performed using a number of behaviours which may include sarcasm and irony, but also features such as and-mockery (Haiman, 1998, Iwata, 2015) and, as discussed in the following section, patronising.

There is an extensive large body of research into irony and sarcasm (e.g. see Gibbs and Colston, 2007 for an overview) which overlaps with mock politeness because sarcasm is one of the frequent realisations of mock politeness, as discussed above. However, despite the proliferation of research in this area, there is surprisingly little agreement over what the terms irony and sarcasm may include in academic discussions. Indeed, as Attardo (2000a:795) states, ‘[t]here is no consensus on whether irony and sarcasm are essentially the same thing […] or if they differ significantly’ which represents a substantial challenge to research because it is not easy to distinguish exactly what construct a given paper is reporting on. Furthermore, this ambiguity between irony and sarcasm largely comes from a lack of clarity regarding first and second status of the discussions, for instance Attardo explains elsewhere that the two cannot be distinguished because they are ‘folk concepts’ (2013:40). This ‘slippage’ between first and second order status makes the interrogation of the relationship particularly salient.

Although this previous work has mainly occurred within irony studies and psychology, it is relatively well-known amongst im/politeness scholars, unlike the work on patronising and condescending behaviours from social psychology which has been less frequently drawn on in im/politeness studies. Furthermore, where patronising or condescending behaviours have been addressed within impoliteness studies, they have not been linked to im/politeness mismatch. In this section, I briefly survey the previous research and explain why I feel patronising and condescending are relevant to investigations of mock politeness.

Starting with work within the im/politeness field, in Culpeper's (1996) impoliteness framework, shown above, the second of the negative impoliteness output strategies is as follows:

Condescend, scorn or ridicule – emphasize your relative power. Be contemptuous.

Do not treat the other seriously. Belittle the other (e.g. use diminutives).

 Culpeper (1996:358)

This category is subsequently applied in Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2010b) and Blas-Arroyo (2013) inter alia, where it is found to be one of the frequent impoliteness output strategies in the contexts of English language comments youtube videos and Spanish language reality TV shows.

More recently, Culpeper's (2011) first-order investigation of metalinguistic labels for reported impoliteness events yielded PATRONISING as a dominant domain. First-order lexical items which were subsumed into this domain included: patronising/patronised, arrogant, condescending, put down, snobby, belittling, disrespectful, abuse of power, bossy, authoritarian, superiority, showing off, authority, take the piss (Culpeper, 2011:94). As he notes, this category has received little attention within impoliteness studies, and yet the behaviour holds great impact. He goes on to explain this, observing that ‘[b]eing patronised involves a kind of “double whammy”: your face is devalued in some way, but it is also devalued in a particular relational context that does not licence the “patroniser” to do so’ (2011:95), the latter point making clear that it involves some kind of mismatch, relating in particular to sociality rights.

These discussions of patronising or condescending behaviour within impoliteness studies make clear why they are important to the realisation of impoliteness but, in order to see evidence of im/politeness mismatch in their structures, research from social psychology studies is particularly insightful. Research in this area has predominately been carried out with reference to intergenerational interactions (e.g. Ytsma and Giles, 1997, Giles et al., 1993, Hehman et al., 2012) and gender relations (e.g. Vescio et al., 2005, Gervais and Vescio, 2012), in particular so-called ‘benevolent sexism’ (Glick and Fiske, 1997). In these conceptualisations, im/politeness mismatch is given a central role because both areas assume that the patronising speaker is under-estimating the competence of the hearer. Thus, in terms of politeness, we might expect it to correspond to an attack on sociality rights, relating to expectations of fair treatment and respect.

However, where research in this area diverges from that into second-order sarcasm, for instance, regards the intentionality of the speaker because the assumption is often that the mismatch is a result of social stereotypes rather than the accomplishment of local, interpersonal impoliteness goals. For instance, according to Hummert and Ryan (2001:263), in the context of intergenerational interactions, ‘communicators do not appear to have the production of patronising communication as their goal […] [i]ronically, those who give patronising messages may be trying to be effective communicators’. Similarly, the reception of behaviour open to interpretations of being patronising has not been found to be universally negative, for instance Ytsma and Giles (1997:259) report that behaviour labelled by others as patronising or condescending may be viewed as helpful or comforting by more frail or dependent participants.7 Although a speaker may not have intended to offend, if a recipient perceived an im/politeness mismatch and is offended, it still fits within the definition of mock politeness provided in section 1.2.

Section snippets

Methodological framework and corpus description

In this section, I briefly describe the conceptual framework for this project, explaining how the first-order metalanguage approach was put into practice and how the mock polite behaviours were identified and annotated.

The metalanguage of mock politeness

The first aspect I wish to address is what first-order terms are actually used to refer to mock politeness. For maximum transparency, an event or behaviour was labelled as mock polite if (a) it contained im/politeness mismatch and (b) it was evaluated in the forum discussions as impolite. Fig. 1 displays the frequency of mock polite behaviours in events labelled by different metapragmatic comments.11

The structures of mock politeness

In this section, two aspects of the structure of mock polite behaviours are presented: the type of im/politeness mismatch and the location of the mismatch.

Conclusions

In this paper I have presented an overview of the current status of mock politeness, surveying previous research, presenting the first-order metalinguistic labels which are used to discuss mock politeness in this dataset, and describing the structures of mock polite utterances. I have argued for the consideration of second-order research into patronising behaviours within the work on mock politeness, reflecting the way that work on sarcasm is currently consulted. The first-order data supports

Charlotte Taylor is Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sussex, UK. Her main research interest relates to verbal aggression and she has approached this from both pragmatic and critical discourse analytic perspectives. Her work in pragmatics initially focussed on courtroom discourse which led to an interest in the mechanisms of im/politeness mismatch in particular. Her work in critical discourse analysis has addressed the media representations of people who migrate.

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